Hi all, hopefully I can get an idea of what I'm dealing with here. Hopefully the title wasn't too vague nor will be my detail with discussing my issue.

I have a 2002 Blazer 4.3 litre 127,000 miles and the past couple of days I've experienced what I can only describe as "power issues".

Basically what I can tell you is that when I go to accelerate it takes quite a while to get up to 50-55 mph and lately I've had to really press down on the gas pedal to get up to that speed or 2000 rpms. This morning during my commute to work I was at a red light before an on-ramp onto the Interstate and as the light went green I hit the gas and as I was turning on to the on-ramp it felt as if my car was trying to shut off. I had to hammer on the pedal to keep the thing from shutting off. This also happened after a few minutes at 55-60 mph and I have noticed that when I accelerate the rpm gauge will quickly move to 2000 rpms and then almost immediately go right back down. There's also been a very low "humming" type of noise when I accelerate the past 2 days. I'm terrible with describing sounds so the only correlation I can make is that it's so low that it sounds like a hybrid when I accelerate.

A couple of other things, that may allow you to pinpoint a possible cause:

- My oil pressure gauge sits at 20 when I'm idle and rises to 40 or 60 when I accelerate. I'm not sure if this is normal or not.

- Currently the Service Engine Soon light is NOT on.

- This issue has only been this bad since Yesterday. I've had some minor issues off and on before that -- and I filled up on Monday so I'm not sure if Bad Gas settling overnight could equate?

Any ideas? Hopefully my descriptions are detailed enough for you. I'm hoping this isn't a big issue, but knowing my luck, it will be. I've also put in a new thermostat and starter in the last 2 months so it would be my luck that something else is prepared to stop working.

Thanks in advance for all your help!

 

Your oil pressure is okay. I would check 2 things - first, test your fuel pressure by following the steps in this post. Secondly, your catalytic converter may be plugged. You can either remove the O2 sensor immediately in front of it (it will make the exhaust loud) and see if the performance changes, or try rapping on the cat with a mallet or fist and see if you can hear anything rattling inside it.