I noticed recently that my gas mileage on my 99 Nissam Almera 1.6L ( EU version of the Sentra basically ) has suddenly gotten really horrible. I connected to the Nissan Consult interface and used the Consultz software to view some ECU data, and at idle it was showing 0.05v, while running at 2krpm it was oscillating fairly quickly. The car is not idling high or rough, which leads me to believe it's not an air leak. It uses a heated 3 wire zirconia HO2S. The resistance for the heater element was just barely in spec at 4.3 Ohms. There was B+ on the heater power pin. I hooked up my UT61E multimeter which is a 22k count TrueRMS and it showed the signal bouncing between about 0.03v to 0.1v. So far it looks like a bad O2, however I decided to hook up my Hantek 1008C to look at the signal and this is what I got at idle:
and this is what I got at 2krpms:
The thing that confused me was that I expected to see a signal oscillating and not this crazy mess. Basically, I'm pretty sure it's the Lambda that's bad, but those waveforms really surprised me.
Is the Lambda bad? Are those waveforms real or do I maybe have a defective scope?
EDIT
The scope has a 1Kh 2 volt signal generator, and I hooked up to that signal and it looks fine:
So I'm guessing the scope is OK and that is just one really messed up Lambda?
Updated Data
OK, so I was doing something wrong I guess before, because now I was able to get a good scope of the Lambda sensor. I recorded three 60 second videos, one of the scan tool data, one of the Lambda scope and one of the four cylinders' sparks.
Basically, the idle is completely normal, both in RPMs and smoothness, yet the O2 is pegged at about 0.05v. When I raise the RPMs to 2500, it starts switching, and when I let off it hangs high, switch maybe 2 or 3 more times then goes back to being pegged low.
I also compared the sparks. This model has a dizy with a built in CMP sensor and coil. I'm not sure exactly what these are supposed to look like, but one thing stood out to me, the Cylinder 1 spark was only about 0.8ms, compared to 1ms on all the other cylinders, and seemed to have a firing line about 1 or 2Kv higher than the other cylinders. Could be related, or completely separate issue.
The car usually gets about 10+ k/l, but it's now getting about 6.7 k/l.
Update Nov. 9th 2017
So here is what the signal looked like before at 2500 RPM:
It's taking over 200ms for it to switch from rich to lean.
And here is with the new Lambda sensor, also at about 2500 RPM:
The frequency is about twice as fast, and the switches are only taking about 100ms now. I'm not sure why it's all wobbly like that, maybe be my cheap scope.
I'll have to drive it around for a few days and see what the results are, but it seems like the old O2 was lazy, so I'm going to accept Ben's answer and if there is still a problem, I'll open a new question.
