I know I know Im an idiot. Ive heard of stories like this and didnt think it would happen to me. I covered the battery terminals, dist, intake, and spark plug area but somehow water still got into a couple of the sparkplug holes. One had quite a bit in there and another was just a little. I dried it the best I could by stuffing absorbent towels down there and soaking it all up, but the car is still running like crap. It starts but bogs and sputters a lot. Sometimes the CEL will start flashing but when I shut it off and restart it, it goes away. Am I screwed on this one or you think it might go away after some new sparkplugs?

 

I would take off the distributor, take the wires off the plugs and let everything dry out and you should be fine. I had something happen like that due to a freak rain storm while I had my hood open. It took about 3 days to dry everything out.

 

Use some PB Blaster is absorbs and disperses the mositure in your DIS cap.

Did you soak your engine or what?

I've never covered any of my components when I pressure wash mine and never have had this problem or any in fact. Maybe because my engine is usually a little warm when I do it and and just shoot a few shots of water towards it.

 

yeah just give it time to dry out! My old engine, when it rained my hood vent let water run down the plug holes since H23 they aren't covered, so any bad rain I ran like crud till it dried out, I got used to parking and puting a towel and trashbag under the hood if the weather looked bad.

 

Since water leaked into your spark plug ports, You will need to dry them out completely.

 

Had this same exact problem on my '91 Integra LS.

Water in the spark plug tube. Spark is grounding itself on the cylinder head which is causing random misfiring. It's a pain in the *** to dry up every little bit of water...trust me, and I'm sure there's still water left in yours. Gotta make sure it's all dried up...even just a little bit of water in those tubes will cause problems.

 

im gonna troubleshoot it today. Ill let you know what happens

 

there is water most likely in your distributor cap as well as in your spark plug tubes. get it all out and it may suddenly run perfect again...

 

i used a vacuum cleaner with a straw to get all the water out on mine, but i changed the plugs any way there was a couple drops left behind, i just start the car with one plug out at a time for a couple seconds...spits out all the crap in the cylinder and the spark plug tube

 

ALL FIXED! Well I pulled the plug wires again yesterday and noticed water sparkplug wire set where the wires connect to the sparkplugs so I took off the cap and wires(the distributor was bone dry as I expected) and brought them upstairs and put a hair dryer to them for a good 10 mins then let them hang for about a half hour.
Then I went back down made sure there was no moisture in the sparkplug tubes and put everything back together.
I started it up and took it for a drive. It drove better for a while and then got really worse. Stopped at advanced auto and pulled them again to see more moisture all over the plug wires. Dried them up and let them sit over the hot engine for a good half hour. Put em back in, drove it and it drove perfect for about a whole min then went to **** again. Pulled the wires and there was even more moisture there.
I figured it the wires had to have soaked up the water and when they got were plugged in the moisture would build up from the heat causing it to ground out. So I gave up and bought some new wires since the ngk's on there were old anyway. Problem fixed