Turtle n Peeps wrote:
A tranny gauge is all you need IMHO. If you truck is stock you're not going to burn it up with factory settings so you don't really need an EGT gauge.
You will know if you don't have boost; believe me! So no need for that either.
One of my trucks has gauges and one doesn't. There is not any reason to look at the gauges anymore for me. It's kind of like: ya, I have boost, ya the EGT is X; ya, so?
If you had a chip my answer would be different.
I will disagree on not needing an EGT gauge. EGT's can get pretty hot when towing even in stock form. Most of the older diesels were not programmed to de-fuel like most modern diesels are and you cold cause some major damage on a long pull. Knowing your EGT along with other temps or pressures could avoid this.
My father got up to 1,250F just pulling his 10k trailer up a maintain road on a trip to Colorado in his 2003 F350 7.3L. His Edge started chiming since he had it set to alert him at 1,200F and above. He backed off the throttle to bring the temps down. Come to find out later that he had an ejector issue in one of his cylinders and if he would not have backed down then it probably would have caused catastrophic engine damage if the temps continued to climb.
Modern diesels will de-fuel if the EGT's get too high, however, you can probably avoid this by downshifting if you knew your EGT. Today's diesels are programmed to hold too high of a gear to save fuel or for other reasons and having a high load pumping out lots of fuel at too low of an rpm will cause EGT's to spike really quickly causing the engine to de-fuel to bring them down. Since most modern diesel automatics allow you to select gears, manually downshifting to a lower gear and higher rpm would bring the EGT's down without the need of de-fueling.
