Quote:
Originally Posted by nightfire
Ok so I've read through the whole thread, but I have a question on all this (during these note that I live in NJ who is pretty heavy on the emissions testing)
If a person were to go with test pipes instead of HFC's could they just clear the CEL and prevent it from coming back on with a program such as UpREV by having it de-activate the second O2 sensor (to prevent any problems when getting inspected)?
I'm trying to figure out why everyone here (who almost everyone wants max performance N/A for now) are going with HFC's instead of test pipes.
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It's going to vary by state, I know nothing about NJ. Here in TX you can generally get away with reprogramming around the CEL (as in, actually reprogramming the ECU), but just "clearing" it with a simple code-scanner won't usually cut it (because the OBD-II info the emissions testing place looks at shows whether a complete drive cycle has been performed since the last code clear, and they want to see it showing completed and free of codes). There's no inspection for the first 2 years on a new car though, so in TX you'd have two years to find an ECU solution before you ran into that issue.
Technically, even in TX, I think test pipes are illegal on public streets, but if you can suppress the codes with an ECU flash, you'll probably get away with it since many inspection places only care about the OBD-II readout.
I went the HFC route because at the time I was making the decision there was no ECU flashing available for the car at all yet, and I didn't want to be fighting clearing the codes all the time until one became available (having a CEL thrown randomly while you're driving and not knowing what it is sucks, gotta shut down, get out the scanner, confirm it's the O2, clear it, wait for it to happen again...).
Once I get an ECU flash going that can suppress the CELs effectively, I may decide to swap my HFCs for Test Pipes at that point, if the rasp isn't too bad (maybe resonated ones would help).