Hello all, my first post here. Admittedly I'm not overly familiar with working on my truck, it was my brothers and I haven't had to do much to it in the short time I've owned it. Truck is a 1997 Ranger, 4 cyclinder 2.3L

Bottom line is that there's a loss of power, which is felt really badly anywhere over about 40mph. If I'm cruising along at about 35-40 and stomp on the gas, the engine will rev out (stick) for a few seconds (but barely accelerating) before returning to the normal rpm. The regular idle seems to be a bit high too, maybe 500 rpm's higher than it should be.

I changed the fuel filter and ran some sea foam through it, seemed to help a little, but it's still not right.

This all happened when I went home to visit the family over the holidays, where it sat for about 10 days. It was also really low on gas when I fired it back up so I was wondering it pulled in some sediment from the bottom of the gas tank?

I've read some posts on here, and maybe it's the IAC valve?? Any thoughts? Any help would be greatly appreciated as I'd love to fix it myself. Thanks!

Anyone have any ideas?

yes check for codes ...even pending codes and get prepared to do a series of fuel pressure test

How do I check for codes without bringing it to a dealer and paying loads of $$? Can you buy a reasonably priced reader or do places like Autozone do that free (or cheap)?

autozone place might check for codes for free.........if you have an android phone for $20 you can make it a scanner or else buy a cheap code reader . I bought one 3 years ago for $20..it works great.....

Great, I'm looking line now at some of the cheap code readers, unfortunately i dont have an android but im checking to see if there are any for my iphone

I just went through this problem on my sons 1994 3.0 4X4, we cleaned the IAC valve, although real dirty with carbon and gunk, it did not fix. Cleaned the MAF and problem solved at this point. We are going to replace the IAC in near future because of how dirty it was.