ECU Switching?
Hi. Just to introduce myself, I admit to being a newbie to performance mods and whatnot, but I'm in the process if getting into it, though I'm on a budget big time (17 year old grocery bagger here). Luckily my parents were nice enough to buy me a car about a year and a half ago, really a lot nicer car than I deserve or expected. I'm not in the market to build some kind of beast machine, and I don't care about ricing up the car (even if i had the funds to build an impressive car, I would keep the stock look), I just want to get a slight bit of added low end and handling capabilities without spending more than about $150. Anyway getting down to business I have a 95 integra special edition, automatic transmission (unfortunately), 130K. I'm just going to have to deal with that whole AT thing for now, I dont want to deal with nor have to buy the parts to change it over. My plans so far are pretty meager - I'm going to ghettorig an Icebox, I've found a lot of existing information about that on the forum, and I think that will go pretty smoothly. Secondly I plan to buy a cheapo set of strut bars to tighten things up, shouldn't be too big of a deal to bolt that down, and lastly I think I'm going to purchase a nice cheap performance ECU for the car (I've seen Spoons on ebay for about $20...and thats about what I wanted to spend). Now on to my question - If I do the ECU thing, I would imagine my beautiful 27.4 MPG average* will drop considerably, even after the intake and filter. SO, If I purchase and ECU, and only use it when I feel like it (ie temporarily use the aftermarket ECU when I feel like it, and using the oem ECU when I'd rather not burn so much gas), would that cause any excess wear on the engine? Also, does anyone know of any sort of kit wherein I could have both ECUs in the car and simply choose which to use before starting the car via a toggle switch? Lastly, how much of a drop in mileage will I have with the cheap aftermarket computer? If its just a couple MPG i could probably just live with it.