25 replies to this topic

[watia1]

Hi all this is my first post so please excuse any mistakes etc.

Anyway I have owned my rover mini cooper 1.3i j reg (SPI) for a year now and inevitably its time for an MOT. Having made a few changes and usual maintainance I was feeling more than happy about my cars chance of passing infact its driving better than ever before. However it failed on 3 things 2 of which were easy fixes the third one im really not so sure about. The emmissions failed majorly even after the garage made all the adjustments they possibly could. CO2 % was 9.185 when the maximum should be 3.5 it passed on idle speed smoke level and HC. It has brand new spark plugs spaced fine and a brand new K&N air filter so cant see any problems there. The bloke at the garage said for a start i should rip it all out and put carbs in (which in fairness wasnt overly helpful). But the only thing they could come up with was that it was the ECU, apparantly they had hooked it up and one of the temperature sensors within the ecu was registering readings flicking between + and - 40 which in his words would account for the high emmissions as the ECU would be trying to compensate for this. He advised borrowing someone elses ecu and taking it back into the garage to do the emissions test. However I dont know anyone with a ECU i can borrow so the only option appears to be to buy one.

So i suppose my question is does this sound like it would be the solution to my cars problem? I dont want to spend £150 on an ecu for it just to fail again and as i have no means of testing emissions prior to mot retest.

Cheers for anyhelp anyone can give me. Also if this is the best solution where would be a good place to get one. I notice minispares/mini sport dont do them have only managed to find a couple on ebay.

[delboyeire]

if he said it was a temp sensor then why change the ecu?

[watia1]

if he said it was a temp sensor then why change the ecu?

Well he said that when he had hooked up whatever gizmo he used to the ecu that the ecu itself was flickering around irratically and not the sensor. To be honest I was a little confussed by this.

[delboyeire]

was this a respectable garage?i cant seem to understand the concept of something just flickering theres always a reason and if its not the ecu a diagnostic would tell you what it is,but sometimes if the problem is the ecu itself,the ecu will blame other things for the problem,iv experienced this with a 206 my dad bought brand new it spent 6 months in a peugeot garage getting everything replaced and it turned out it was the ecu,it just wouldnt tell on itself

[Mr Joshua]

Where are you as I have 2 ecu's that will never taste electricity again also he is right about the carbs You can turn the the mixture up and down at will. when I took mine in about a month ago all the board was green the co was reading .63 after the test was done he said I had better up the mixture a bit so we set it to 2.76 when I got home I tweeked it a little more so now its probably around 3-4.

Do not discount what he said about carbs it is a lot easier to sort fueling problems and your car would be a lot more tuneable. Both my minis were SPi's but now they are carbed.

edit: for spelling

Edited by Mr Joshua, 28 August 2010 - 12:37 PM.

[watia1]

was this a respectable garage?i cant seem to understand the concept of something just flickering theres always a reason and if its not the ecu a diagnostic would tell you what it is,but sometimes if the problem is the ecu itself,the ecu will blame other things for the problem,iv experienced this with a 206 my dad bought brand new it spent 6 months in a peugeot garage getting everything replaced and it turned out it was the ecu,it just wouldnt tell on itself

Yer this is the most respectible garage I have managed to find they dont over charge or do unneccesary work come highly advised by all. He seemed quite confident it was the ECU but advised me to ask around on some of the forums. I watched the guy fiddling with it for over an hour. My major concern is that if i change the ECU or if I just change the temperature sensor I wont actually know untill I get it back to the garage. The guy said the temperature obv wasnt flickering around but there was an error with the ecu interpretting it. I did have a problem with the engine running ridiculously to richly last year but that was fixed with a new vacuum and petrol consumption smoke etc. dont seem to have been an issue ever since.

[Mr Joshua]

We have seen no end of cars with temp sensor issues this year find yours and change them take it to Halfords and they use to do a free emmissions test. If it fails read the above post

if he said it was a temp sensor then why change the ecu?

[watia1]

Where are you as I have 2 ecu's that will never taste electricity again also he is right about the carbs You can turn the the mixture up and down at will. when I took mine in about a month ago all the board was green the co was reading .63 after the test was done he said I had better up the mixture a bit so we set it to 2.76 when I got home I tweeked it a little more so now its probably around 3-4.

Do not discount what he said about carbs it is a lot easier to sort fueling problems and your car would be a lot more tuneable. Both my minis were SPi's but now they are carbed.

edit: for spelling

My only concern re carbs is that I have been told carbs generally run with higher co2 and the car having been originally an spi it is tested on that basis. The general picture I have been given is that its very hard to pass an mot with an spi car running carbs, however your story now seems to contradict that. It is something I would like to do in the near future depending on money ( Im a student I hate to admit) but for the moment I need my car back on the road asap.

Im based around the Milton Keynes area where abouts are you and how much would you want for an ECU?

[watia1]

We have seen no end of cars with temp sensor issues this year find yours and change them take it to Halfords and they use to do a free emmissions test. If it fails read the above post

if he said it was a temp sensor then why change the ecu?

Only problem with going to halfords is my old mot is out and they are red hot for automatic number plate recognition stuff round here

[lrostoke]

Somebody may clarify this but I think the emmisions for a Spi should actually be a lot lower than the 3.5% they aimed for

This is from Haynes

Idle speed - nominal value, for reference only . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 850 ± 25 rpm
Idle mixture CO % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 0.5% maximum


Sounds like he couldn't find your car on the database, because how it works on your age of car is look for it on the database and test to the car specific figures, which I assume will be the figures above.
If they can't find it on the database test it as non cat with a 3.5% limit.

This is why its been mentioned about just slapping carbs onto an injection car not always being a solution, its very hard to get carbs to meet that 0.5% limit and still be driveable.

Edited by lrostoke, 28 August 2010 - 01:37 PM.

[watia1]

Somebody may clarify this but I think the emmisions for a Spi should actually be a lot lower than the 3.5% they aimed for

This is from Haynes

Idle speed - nominal value, for reference only . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 850 ± 25 rpm
Idle mixture CO % . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 0.5% maximum


Sounds like he couldn't find your car on the database, because how it works on your age of car is look for it on the database and test to the car specific figures, which I assume will be the figures above.
If they can't find it on the database test it as non cat with a 3.5% limit.

This is why its been mentioned about just slapping carbs onto an injection car not always being a solution, its very hard to get carbs to meet that 0.5% limit and still be driveable.

Well I thought 3.5 was alot higher than the test standard was suppossed to be, but assummed I had misread or missunderstood. However Im not complaining because if it was tested at 0.5 that would have been an even bigger failure. Im still very unclear as to what I should do. Is there anyway I can test if the temperature sensor is working properly independantly of the ecu and then I should be able to establish if its the sensor or the ECU (correct me if my logic is floored)


Cheers

[lrostoke]

I think there's an FAQ in here somewhere about testing certain stuff on the injections.
Certain I've seen test instructions for the lambda sensor .

Although to be honest after fitting a CAT and a Lambda sensor to my brothers and still not solving a similar high reading problem I admitted defeat and it went into the local mini specialist.
Luckily I "obtained" the CAT and Lambda free through work so nothing lost except a bit of time

Edited by lrostoke, 28 August 2010 - 02:07 PM.

[icklemini]

map pipes, temp sender (or a blocked pipe), idle switch stuck (if it has one). lambda stuck reading low...

99% probably not the ECU...

need to read the data coming from the ECU and do some diagnosis.. i only thought it was main dealers that do the "you need a new ecu mate" trick

ttfn,
Dave

Edited by icklemini, 28 August 2010 - 05:34 PM.

[watia1]

map pipes, temp sender (or a blocked pipe), idle switch stuck (if it has one). lambda stuck reading low...

99% probably not the ECU...

This seems to be what everthing else I have read suggests. How do I go about diagnosing which bits not working without being able to talk to the ECU or not being able to drive the car anywhere as it has no MOT??????

I was looking at mappable ECU's (this was something I wanted anyway, but this may prove a good time to look into getting one) but would a mappable ECU aid in identifying which componant is failing? Also is it possible to alter/ manage emissions with a mappable ECU for instance enabling the lowering of emissions for an MOT???

Cheers for all the help

What Mappable ECU's do people advise?

Edited by watia1, 28 August 2010 - 05:58 PM.

[icklemini]

you can drive to a garage with no mot for repairs...
spend the money on a proper diagnosis..

MAP pipes - physically check them - they connected/split/etc...
Temperature - where is the temperature guage reading when the car is up to normal? - needle should be straight in the middle...

mappable ecu? - how much do you want to spend?

but would a mappable ECU aid in identifying which componant is failing?

Nope - how would it know its failing??

Also is it possible to alter/ manage emissions with a mappable ECU for instance enabling the lowering of emissions for an MOT???

The whole thing is mappable, so properly setup it should go through the MOT anyway...

Think you may be trying to use a sledge hammer to crack a nut with the mappable ECU idea to fix your current problem.
Can understand it if you are planning lots of heavy engine modifications, and maybe even if your ECU is duff.. but they aint cheap!

Edited by icklemini, 28 August 2010 - 06:17 PM.