Well I bought and installed the cheap parts store alternator and regulator. It worked fine yesterday. But today... it started acting up.
On the 60 mile drive to the Savannah airport, my voltage started bouncing all over the place. Anywhere between 12.8 and 16.1 volts! I stopped at another oreillys and exchanged my voltage regulator to see if that would help. It didn’t, but I was already almost to the airport, so I kept going. I picked my sister up and about halfway back we ran into some really slow moving, stop and go traffic. If you’ve seen my other posts you’ll know my car has cooling issues in traffic. The temps got up to higher than ever before... 240°. After that I said screw it and drove down the shoulder and “safely” ran a red light just so I could cool it down some. About 3 miles later the AFR gauge went dead lean and the car shut off. When I went to try to start it back, I didn’t hear the fuel pump kick on like I normally do. I checked all of the connections to the major components of the Sniper EFI and everything looked good. I let the car sit for about 5 minutes and then it started back and was running as good as always. Got back out on the road and almost made it home. About 50 feet away from my driveway it shut off again. Luckily I was able to just roll into my driveway.
I’m not sure if the super intense engine temperature affected the ecu causing the fuel pump to shut down or if the constant pulsing of voltage hurt the pump.
When it first happened I touched the fuel pump and it was not hot at all, but when I would turn the key on, I could hear it was almost struggling to get going.
I’m leaning towards the voltage spikes causing it because when the voltage would go up, I could hear the sound of the fuel pump increase in pitch. It almost sounded like a broken siren sounding like “VVVVvvvvvVVVVvvvvVVVV”. The Sniper system can operate on a 16v system so I don’t think it was over powered.
I’m just glad we made it home.
