My first EAS problem

[Pete38]

Was just driving along on a smooth road and the dash came up EAS fault.

Quickly switched the EAS off using my dash switch. All corners stayed up yippee.

Have just stopped at someone's place and turned the EAS on thinking I can always pump it back up manually. The height stays fine, almost seems to adjust the height to the correct highway height it was in before the Fault.

The dash goes beep beep beep with all height lights flashing. Says EAS fault in dash. Does the beeping three or so times again while the lights flash. After a few times of this it ends up with solid lights on the height indicator and EAS fault on display.

Now the interesting part is the Nanacom can't communicate with the EAS. Hmm never has that. Car was running and the two fuses in the engine bay are fine, well they looked it. This is the bit that surprises me a little.

Any suggestions? I won't have time to look much deeper until the weekend quite likely. At least there is no leak so the car will stay in highway height and not have to use the emergency valves every half hour of driving or anything.

[davidsonsm]

Could it be an all too rare eas brain fault? I have a spare if you want to try it?

[Keithy P38]

Have you recently calibrated to suit your lift? Haven't put it on the upper or lower limit for a particular height?

May have to turn your switch off to communicate to the ECU as well

[Pete38]

Could it be an all too rare eas brain fault? I have a spare if you want to try it?

Oh dear. I do hope not... After a quick look that might not be a cheap little problem.

I may well take you up on that for diagnostics purposes. Appreciate the offer Sean. Obviously I'll pay the postage and even buy it off you unless you wanted to keep it as a spare.

But I will look into this more so I'll take your kind offer as a rain check for now.

[benji]

Currently I've got fuse 24 switched at the delay timer (white wire, no. 4 input) and the nanocom won't communicate with it off.
My classic wouldn't communicate with story's software when the earth was disconnected too.

That's a bugga!

Sent from my GT-I9305T using AULRO mobile app

[Pete38]

Have you recently calibrated to suit your lift? Haven't put it on the upper or lower limit for a particular height?

May have to turn your switch off to communicate to the ECU as well

Yeh the height was all calibrated as soon as I did the lift. I did get a hard fault in that stage as I didn't have the extension quite enough. But that came up as a fault and it was easily reset. I sort of wish I was getting a sensor out of range error to be honest. But fixed that and have flexed it many times.

Turning the switch off and on again makes the eas go through that same procedure I described above each time, so I also know there is power there otherwise the switch on would do nothing. Switching the EAS off leaves the solid lights on the height display and has no obvious effect even though the EAS has had its power cut. Just switching it back on (power back on for the EAS) makes it go through the same procedure.

[Pete38]

Currently I've got fuse 24 switched at the delay timer (white wire, no. 4 input) and the nanocom won't communicate with it off.
My classic wouldn't communicate with story's software when the earth was disconnected too.

That's a bugga!

Sent from my GT-I9305T using AULRO mobile app

I'm switching the purple and red wine off memory. The main eas brains power as far as I'm aware. I was hoping that I hadn't turned the switch back on but wasn't that lucky.

[Pete38]

Just to help with the confusion of whats happening.... when I switch the power back onto the EAS it definately appears like the EAS is leveling out. First time it seemed to lift the front a little and then bring it back down with the car ending up being level. But always stuck at highway height where it was before the dreaded EAS fault notification.

Over the next few days (possibly the weekend) I will check my EAS isolation switch (unlikely the problem seeing it doesn't appear to be a power issue). Try the Nanacom after disconnecting power to the car and draining the system. Try my EAS cable with EAS Unlock and laptop which I bought before but have always used the Nanacom instead.

Other than that I don't have many other debugging things I can think of seeing it seems like a communication problem, not a faulty height sensor, dodgy valve etc...

That will give me things to do and check in the mean time but I'm still open for suggestions :D

[Scouse]

I have Ron's T4 (Testbook) out at my place at the moment & there's one or two P38s here if you want to swap any parts around to help with diagnosis.

[Pete38]

I have Ron's T4 (Testbook) out at my place at the moment & there's one or two P38s here if you want to swap any parts around to help with diagnosis.

Now that would be fantastic!! I'm good for Saturday morning but I'm also happy to wait for another more suitable time for you. Good thing is the car is still drivable.

[Scouse]

Saturday is fine with me. I'm not completely up to speed with T4 as I've only used it to change Markets & clear a few faults from my little rewiring job but I'm sure we can have a look at what's going on with your car.


I'll PM my address.

[Pete38]

Saturday is fine with me. I'm not completely up to speed with T4 as I've only used it to change Markets & clear a few faults from my little rewiring job but I'm sure we can have a look at what's going on with your car.


I'll PM my address.

Thanks Scott. Very kind of you.

[Pete38]

Well it looks like all is well with the EAS with a few simple checks.

I played with a few connections this morning and reconnected the Nanacom (including the connection to the OBD port.

So while warming the car up to leave I booted the Nanacom up and it powered up as it always has but surprisingly it found the EAS.

I head into faults to find the right hand front sensor out of range.

Reset the fault and all was good for the EAS.

Get underneath to find the new height sensor mod clamp wasn't connected properly so the sensor arm wasn't connected.

Connected it back up properly this time and all is good.

So I suspect two things happened all around the same time. The height sensor disconnected which threw the fault and at the same time I had a bad connection (which I suspect was the plug to the OBD port) that then meant the Nanocom couldn't find the EAS. So with two problems at once the lounge diagnostics pointed to far worse than just a height sensor problem as they come up as faults.

I'm not so sure how the car remained quite level with one sensor arm disconnected, even though it made the car level out for a bit when I turned the EAS back on before it went into full fault. I suspect it ignored the out of range sensor and got the other three right, which effectively makes the 4th corner (faulty one) almost correct as it acts like a slave.

Wish I had time before to check over everything more thoroughly so I didn't waste anyones time. Just I have been in the office during all daylight hours since the fault came up so there was no immediate need or wish to get out there and check everything.

I'd like to thank Scott (Scouse) for offering his assistance and Ron for the availability of Testbook. And to Keith, Benji and Sean for their comments. Just goes to show there are a good bunch of owners of P38's on here happy to help out others. Hope I can offer someone (Scott in particular seeing his location is close) some help if they ask.

[davidsonsm]

Bloody relief it was a straightforward matter. I think we all have a tendency with these cars to jump to worst case scenario. They are more resilient than we give them credit for.