TheReve

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.

Josher

If you're not really going to or planning on doing much work, why go through the hassel of swapping out an ecu all the time? Also, are you sure that for $20 you're not just getting a chip? Looking at ebay, I only see chips for about $20. The actual cpus that I saw cost about $150 and boast gains of 8-21 hp. To me, if you're not going to mod your car, don't get the ecu that is made for a heavily modded Integra. That's just my opinion.

Spend your money on a sound system or hang onto the money, because with 130k, things are likely to start going. I've got 130k and recently had to replace the radiator on my 96 LS.

SP00NFed

yeah i wouldn't do that chip off ebay...and its not an ecu...i believe its just a chip that you have to get put in yourself, IMO those chips = crap and if you have nothing done to your car its not gonna help you at all

dubcac

First of all, like they said, it's most likely just a chip for the ECU, you'd still have to pay someone to solder in a socket to your ECU. That being said, you wouldn't see any gains from it, especially being auto. If I was you, I would spend the money on suspension. Get a decent set of springs and shocks, and some stickier tires. Unfortunately since you are automatic, on the go fast/horsepower side of performance you won't really see your full potential...but that doesn't mean you can't hang a corner with the best of them.

TheReve

Oh I see now about the chip vs an actual ECU, I really wouldn't want to deal with that, and thanks for the input, I'll just stick to suspension tuning and fun. Thanks again.

VTBimmer535is

Being an auto has nothing to do with the performance output of the engine. You'll still get the same power from the chip.

Also, just from my bmw side, i just put an ECU in myself and was not hard to do at all and it is a significant difference in power vs. stock chip. You would have to look at the higher end chips to actually get some power out of it. I'm not sure how much you want to spend on a chip, but if you can get an ACTUAL one from like mugen or one of the major car tuners you could get some good power out of it.

On gas mileage, the chip will not affect that, it just depends on you drive the car with the chip in it I wanted to floor it off of every light cause it had so much more power, so its all a drivers thing

Good luck, if you're not willing to spend much money on mods, that the guys advice and use it for repairs to keep the car on the road.

~Andrew

Snoopy

being an auto will limit how much power you can make because honda auto's are notorious for not holding a lot of power. your bmw is completely different from an integra. you cannot compare the two. honda ecu's are already very well programmed from the factory. there's not much you can do to improve on it with a stock engine. you cant just plug in a generic chip and expect 10hp like you would in your bimmer. even an authentic mugen, spoon, skunk2, etc. ecu wouldnt be ideal because those ecu's were tuned on a certain engine, in certain conditions, with certain mods. every engine is different and needs to be tuned differently. there is no one size fits all chip.

a worthwhile ecu upgrade would be to something fully programmable like hondata or aem ems. they allow you to control everything from ignition timing, fuel maps, rev limits, and a ton of other stuff. but, you would need more than a basic i/h/e setup and have it tuned on the dyno to see significant results.