3 months in repair shops and still won't idle!

FANICULI

MEMBER
HONDA ACCORD

Hello,

I have a 2000 Honda Accord (VTEC SE auto) with 65,000 miles on it. The car was converted to lpg (dual fuel) before I bought it.

The car will not idle properly at any point under either lpg or unleaded. It appears to be a basic vacuum or timing problem, but two mechanics (lpg installers) have now given up on it. There are no fault codes, and as far as I'm told, the MAP sensor is fine. The cylinders seem to have good compression and had no leakage either.

Today the car went to the Honda dealer who rang me back a few hours later to say that there are no fault codes, so I should take the car to an lpg specialist.

I really feel like I have a good car with a fixable problem. But after 3 months of trying with no results, I'm beginning to lose hope.

Any and all advice is welcome.

Thanks.

4 Replies

BRUCE HUNT

MECHANIC
3,753 POSTS

When you say idling properly, is it surging up and down without a constant rpm? Explain the idling more please. If it is surging, I would check for a leak at the intake manifold.

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Tuesday, September 26th, 2006 AT 7:00 AM

FANICULI

MEMBER
3 POSTS

When stopped at traffic lights, etc. The idle falls quickly below 500. Sometimes it stalls immediately and sometimes it just barely ticks over. Left without any help from the throttle it will stall.

As you would guess, the vacuum in the engine is very low (or non-existent) but actually finding a leak or obvious timing problem is turning out to be a huge challenge.

I am told that the engine is burning very little of the fuel going into it (because we can see very high emissions on the exhaust). One mechanic who has spent some time with the car agrees that it could be the intake manifold, but he could not find any reasonable info about how to troubleshoot that system.

Thanks for the reply.

-N-