RX7Club.com - Mazda RX7 Forum - Running the car w/ air pump in place but disconnected. PFC installed

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Running the car w/ air pump in place but disconnected. PFC installed

I am getting some awful noises from the air pump when it is hooked up so have left it disconnected (just the connector).

Mods:
HKS DP
RB Catback
Apexi PFC

Questions:
Is it ok to run the car with the air pump connector disconnected?

From previous posts, it seems the stock ECU required some portion of fresh air injected into the engine by the air pump at low RPM to run properly. Does the PFC have a similar requirement with a Base Map?
I believe the PFC is the one with serial S4 (non-OLED commander).

Does it make a difference if I were to change out the cat to a hi-flo? Does it matter if the split air pipe is vented to atmosphere under the car somewhere vs hooked up to the cat?

Ideally, I'd like to leave the stock plumbing for emissions so I can just swap out the cat and stick on the split-air to pass the sniffer and if it is safe to run with the air pump simply disconnected, I wouldn't really bother connecting the split air to the hi-flo since I will most likely need to swap it out to the stock cat anyway when it comes emissions time.
Thanks!

The air pump is an emissions item, it's there to feed fresh air into your cat to help with the burn (if I remember correctly). You do NOT need to have the air pump connected for your engine to function, in fact many (just about all) people end up removing them as they progress onward with aggressive modifications.

Quote:

Originally Posted by fendamonky (Post 12222615)

The air pump has different modes. One is called split air, which sends air to the cat. That's only during certain higher load non boosted cruising conditions. The other is called port air, which sends air to the exhaust manifold and back through the intake ports during overlap. That operates at idle and low load.

On a stock ECU it is going to be pretty sensitive to not having the air pump running. On the PFC, I am speculating that you won't see as much of an effect, but since you didn't provide any data logs it's hard to say what's going on.