HP Tuners - Part V - Turn Off the Air Pump.
OK so we are back to Series 1. I know we are going back and forth between disabling codes (in Series 2) and turning off actual components but that is deliberate, I want us all to see what we are doing and why we are doing it.
Why bother, why go through all of this? Why not just unplug a component and be done with it, well cause it's like this, imagine you come home from work on Monday night and you just want to have a beer and watch the football game, but then your wife says honey, I am running late do you mind starting dinner, ok, now you get to have a beer, try to watch the game, while you cook dinner, ok, then grandma returns the two year old from day care and until your wife gets home you gotta watch her too, ok, now you get to have a beer, sort of watch the game, do your best to cook dinner, and kinda watch the kid?
See where I am going with this analogy/metaphor? The point is you want the PCM to PCM the engine, not the EGR, not the Air Pump, not the AC, not the traction control, and any other components that are no longer there. Why? because it takes away from the computing power, more specifically it now takes longer for the PCM to make the short term fuel trim adjustments and long term fuel adjustments, and adjustments based on the MAF or the O2 sensor feedback. Yeah it may be milliseconds but we are not talking about super computing power, that poor old PCM is 20 years old, I bet the iPhone watch has more processing power than it does, so every bit helps, I did not mean to sound condescending I was trying to make a point in a funny entertaining way.
So in this article we will actually disable the Air Pump, in addition to suppressing the diagnostic codes like we did in the last article. Keep in mind HP Tuners was developed by a third party and not by General Motors so in some cases they have an Enable / Disable button, in other cases you turn things on and off by sort of tricking the system. You do that by entering numbers or values that will never be reached as in this case the Air Pump is controlled by ECT, Engine Coolant Temperature. As it sits at 36 degrees right now, the Air Pump will not come on until the engine warms up hotter than 36*. So to make it never turn on we set it to 284* (Top Tip: when ever you don't know what values to put in the box, simply gaze at the bottom of the window you are in while hovering your mouse over the field or button you have questions about
: in our case it says the values we can enter here fall between -40 and 285, well I tried 285 and it didn't like it so we settle for 284)
DISCLAIMER and I hate Disclaimers: We are doing this in the context of guys doing engine swaps into old Chevy trucks where we did not even install the air pump, I am not suggesting you turn off the Air Pump on your daily 1999-2007 trucks as there may be SMOG implications, etc.
1. Again we start in the comfort of our own home, we fire up our laptop and launch the Editor. Open the file we saved in Step 3 of Section D. (Our last saved file is always our starting point).
2. Make changes in the Editor, this time we will make changes only to the Air Pump settings found under Engine\General tab. Enter 284 in the box next to Disable ECT. This means do not turn on the Air Pump until the engine coolant temp reaches 284 degrees. (Additional instructions with each pic)
3. Save the changes you made to a new file and call it something like "09 - Disabled Air Pump"
4. Now you get to move the operation to your truck, hook up your HP Tuner to the OBDII port and then your USB cable to your laptop, turn the key to the ON position, launch the Editor program, and simply write the new changes to the PCM.
Note:
sometimes you have to write the entire tune file to the PCM, sometimes it is perfectly happy with only writing what's changed, more on this later.
More words with each pic, honestly this guy likes to hide some gold nuggets in these sections: