Need help with electrical PD - batt voltage & oil pressure

[ciaka]

Do you have advice on PD?  Never really did pd on electrical and not familiar with ground locations on PTT.  If you can help with info will be great.  Thank you in advance.

 

I appear to have 2 issues observed:

- oil pressure sensor 

- voltage regulation levels or grounding

 

Here is what happened and what I did so far:

Got the issues initially due to cylinder misfires. 
Replaced plugs in affected cylinder (7). 
Next day got similar but for cyl 5, 6. 
Replaced 5, 6 with new plugs (now total 3 swapped - 5, 6, 7).
Next day, driving home, get cylinder misfires.  Park in lot near autozone.  Scan codes, cyl 5, 6 misfires. 
Cleared all codes from car.
Try start car, now get error oil pressure fault, no oil pressure on cluster. 
Shut off car,  repeat again with same error.  On third time, car starts and oil pressure appears on cluster and shows ok at about 1.2bar. 
Turned off car, scanned codes, none, cleared anyway.
Now, car wont start (batt on cluster shows 11.1 v).  Try turning over maybe 5 times. 
On last try, try turn key, power appears to die (cluster goes blank, no turn over).  So I think batt bad. 
Disconnect, reconnect batt in trunk.  Nothing. 
Smelled insulation burn smell from engine (under hood, near driver side shock area).
Went to autozone.  Got sales guy get batt from store, with boost cables.
Go to car, connect new batt to boost terminals in car.  I go into cabin to turn key, while sales guy looking at hood.
I turn key, car starts, sales guy said he saw a small puff of grayish smoke in area of front driver shock mount where there are many wires.  Smell was there for short time but disappeared.
Batt volt on cluster was saying 12.4v or similar.  
Car now is running fine.  I drove home about 15 miles.  No issues or errors.
Connected multimeter to battery in trunk.  With car off but acc on, Shows 18.1V.  Expected 14.5V.  Cluster shows about 12.5V
Started car, batt shows across terminals 18.5V.  Cluster shows 12.6V
Stopped car, no more insulation smell.
Disconnected batt from car, checked voltage across terminals.  Shows 18.4V.  wow, should not be this high I am thinking.
Left disconnected overnight.  Now checked voltage across batt. shows 17.5v.  still too high.
So now, car in garage battery disconnected.  Oil pressure sensor ordered on way.
Need to get a good idea on how to pd the grounds, and check where voltage regulator is on this car to see if bad.
Anyone who can help thank you very much in advance.

 

So far, for oil pressure sensor, ordered replacement to swap.  Praying it is not the oil pump...lets not go there now.

You think ok to drive the car?  My worry is the 18v on 12V systems.

[ciaka]

UPDATE:

 

I took the battery itself to an auto parts store Oreillys.  They put a load tester on it.  Comes out as good.

Asked them what the voltage read.  They tested again and showed me - 12.59V.  WTF.

 

So I go home.  Originally used a small 20 dollar DMM.  Took out my good 400 bucks DMM.

Measure voltage across batt terminals.  Reads 12.6V.  

So the voltage on my batt is good, the batt is good too.

 

I am at a loss now.  I wont drive car until the oil sensor comes and I get a chance to crawl under car.  

Appears that the cluster was showing correct voltage.  No new errors were detected last time I scanned for them, today am.

[ciaka]

So far, took apart the GND and PWR terminals under hood. Cleaned well to have good contacts. Put back together. Cleaned the batt terminals and connections well in trunk.
Waiting for oil pressure sensor to arrive. Then I will put car up, replace sensor and get a good look at the GND strap from alternator to engine. Also planning to use snake camera to trace the power cable under hood, where it disappears from jumper terminal, into the side fender hole. Hoping to see something that can cause my symptoms, but doubtful since if the PWR wire was shorted to chassis, I would be burning fuses left and right, and if not, then would have a nice warm light show.

So far, after last car reset, no issues, no codes, no nothing. Drove it about 60 miles so far, in normal mode, sport mode and sport plus mode. Even did a launch to try cause something to surface. Nothing. No errors, etc.
Last thing I did today before going to work, curiously, was disable reversing camera in PCM. Why? Well, over last month or so, it sometimes quit working, and interestingly, only if you read codes, you can see PCM code for reverse camera, saying open circuit. My assumption is camera may be going. Need to find way to get to the camera to remove, and inspect or replace. Anyone knowing how to do this will be awesome. FSM does not have good info (unless I am not looking in correct place).
Thanks.

 

[JFP in PA]

2 hours ago, ciaka said:

So far, took apart the GND and PWR terminals under hood. Cleaned well to have good contacts. Put back together. Cleaned the batt terminals and connections well in trunk.
Waiting for oil pressure sensor to arrive. Then I will put car up, replace sensor and get a good look at the GND strap from alternator to engine. Also planning to use snake camera to trace the power cable under hood, where it disappears from jumper terminal, into the side fender hole. Hoping to see something that can cause my symptoms, but doubtful since if the PWR wire was shorted to chassis, I would be burning fuses left and right, and if not, then would have a nice warm light show.

So far, after last car reset, no issues, no codes, no nothing. Drove it about 60 miles so far, in normal mode, sport mode and sport plus mode. Even did a launch to try cause something to surface. Nothing. No errors, etc.
Last thing I did today before going to work, curiously, was disable reversing camera in PCM. Why? Well, over last month or so, it sometimes quit working, and interestingly, only if you read codes, you can see PCM code for reverse camera, saying open circuit. My assumption is camera may be going. Need to find way to get to the camera to remove, and inspect or replace. Anyone knowing how to do this will be awesome. FSM does not have good info (unless I am not looking in correct place).
Thanks.

 

 

What you should be doing is running a voltage drop across the primary cables; anything more than 0.5 V means the cables need to be replaced.

[ciaka]

I think I figured it all out.

2 separate issues here

- ignition coil(s) going bad

- oil pressure sensor intermittent (twice now in a month) not reading

 

All grounds are good, ran voltage drop tests at various components including alternator, no issues.  Good solid ground.

 

Once coil needs replacing.  Possibly up to 3.  Replaced all my plugs and coils 1.5 years ago (28k miles).  Ordered ZSE042 rev 14, but after they arrived, revision received was 06.

Only one of the coils was ZSE042 latest revision.  Was really surprised to see coil go bad after only 28k miles.  Old rev can help explain it.

There are 2 other coils that I removed and cleaned, that are running ok now, but have seen misfire on them.  Plugs were already replaced regardless.

So on the coil, so far so good.  Mad cannot drive my car though (well, can if I reset the codes each time, but they do come back every 60 miles or so).

 

Oil pressure sensor will be swapped asap.  Should be easy, and I do not want to run chance of this not working right.  

 

As to the electrical, I had a dealer look at the car about 2 weeks ago.  It was a routine 'hey can you scan and tell me buddy what you think needs doing'.  They said sure.  

The genius who 'looked' at it, left a rubber tube of some sort, inside bay.  Does not belong to car.  After couple weeks being there, the tube moved and just happened to relocate to where it was touching the manifold. Hence the smell.  Was strict coincidence for all these 3 things to come together.  At least I have resolution to this.  Still, have to wait for the coil, which is a bummer.

 

Will update again after swaps.  Thanks so much to all who helped.  You ever heard of 28k coils needing replace?  wow, talk about short lived.

[RobertDenali]

Based on your original post I would have said order an oil pressure sensor and check your coils.

 

 

 

 

[ciaka]

Waiting for parts.  Turns out the coils still under warranty so getting them exchanged.  Just got the oil pressure sensor.

Will try to replace this week if all arrives here.