NickLamb

I have a Civic Coupe 96, and I have a rather annoying intermittent problem that I think I have traced back to the main relay

There seems to be no pattern to the scenarios where the problems happen, but the symptom is all ways the same

I have two issues
1) occasionally when I am starting it, the yellow engine check light does not go out and the hum from the fuel pump does not sound, the car will not start

2)occasionally when driving the engine check light will come on, and the engine looses power, if I am lucky the momentum of the car kicks the engine back into life

As I said I recon its down to the Relay, but this has been replaced and for a while after it was fixed it was better but it seems to be returning to its old ways again

Someone suggested it could be a bad earth, naively I thought this was possibly just one wire from the battery to the chassis, but looking at other posts here it is evident there is more than one, in fact loads of them

Could someone advise a) if bad earth sounds like my issue and b) advise where to find the earth that would be at the route of my problems

Hope someone can help as I am close to ditching an otherwise lovely car

Thanks in advance

Former User

Try cleaning and tightening the G101 ground on the thermostat housing. If that doesn't help, start shopping for a replacement ECU.

NickLamb

Thanks For the advice Ron

I tried cleaning up the earth as suggested and for a while it behaved well
Now though things have got a lot worse now, in a recent trip the car died on me and I ended up being towed home, the AA chap was very good checking all he could, including suggesting the earth was good he did this touching some electrode tester on the engine, not sure if this is specific enough for the one from the main relay

Anyway it now won't spring into life. The engine check stays lit no matter how long I leave it, the AA man did try to disconnect the battery for a couple of mins to see if a reset would do, it did not, I wonder though if I leave it off for longer could a hard reset do the job

If I need a new ECU , how easy is it to fit

Thanks again, I am so close to scrapping my lovely coupe so I am pretty desperate to find a solution

NickLamb

Update

I located the ECU found the plug were you can bridge the to sockets, and I found my engine warning light did not blink at all, I assume this means I ether have bot bridged the gap well enough, or there is no fault

Anyway I tried to remove the earth connector to clean it up but it won't budge, it does not help I suppose that it is in a fairly confined space. I did find though that after messing around the car seems to be fine, just wondering though how reliable it's going to be

Any thoughts from posters or experts would be appreciated

Thanks in advance