I fitted an Induction kit to my 2003 STI in the winter



All was fine throttle response was better and nice wastegate chatter noise on lift off...

In Mid may my problems started..got an engine management light on.. P0171 System Too Lean- Bank 1 there did not appear to be any drop in performance, this light came on, on the way to Dorchester at 50mph, it was a hot day. Light was reset and after checking everything all was happy. On Thursday last week taking the kids to the beach, holding 50mph on the M4 through the camera's and the light came on again..same fault, light was reset and it the car seemed to chattering on throttle as well as on lift.

This morning sat in traffic for 2 mins and the light came back on again...

Found the fault at last....basically now the weather has changed and is warmer, the filter can't get enough cold air, the pipe that comes through the inner wing and normally fits into the airbox was too big to sit inside the filter of the induction kit, so it has been sucking warm air and leaning out...it also has been effecting boost with the car only boosting to 0.7 bar.

The standard airbox was refitted today and the car is a different animal, car is boosting to 1.3 bar throughout the gears and I am wondering where those horses have been hiding.

So a word of warning, if you are going to fit an induction kit, my advice would be to forget it, fit a good panel filter instead, they look pretty for the shows etc..but will cause detonation. and lead to serious engine damage.

You may get away with it by getting a filter that does accomodate the cold air feed pipe but ideally will need some sort of heat shield to protect the filter or seal it off altogether. Or some sort of seperate cold air feed routed to it.

I thought it was a simple mod but was wrong, needs rethinking, hope this will help others..

 

would of thought it would need to be mapped in to the car to stop the above happening

 

You'd need a remap really with it.

 

ditto,

Those forced air induction kits lean out the mixture way too much for the warmer ambient temps... anyone fitting one needs a remap or you're going to grenade your engine with pre detination.

The only thing saving your engine was the ecu's knock detection mate.. retarding the advance and killing the boost (trying to save itself) you are a lucky man!

 

absolutely, and if this helps to prevent anyone else getting into bother then happy dayz..

 

Induction kits merely make you think you have more power due to more noise. lol

An enclosed filter will be cooler consistantly so will perform better anyway as theres no heatsoak.

 

Hahahahahahaha!

 

I found a similar problem with mine. I fitted a quickshift stainless steel induction kit to my classic about a month ago when the weather was colder up here but in the last 2 weeks with the heatwave my car felt down in power so I refitted the airbox and the car feels alot better. Guess whats going on ebay!

 

same here