In the shop this week was a 2019 Honda Civic Sport with standard transmission and about 95,000kms. The owner complained of a recent problem in that when he was idling at a red light, the rpms dipped rather low and the engine sounded like it was going to stall. The owner would have to rev the engine a little to keep it from shutting down. This kind of thing would make any driver nervous about having their car give out on them. With idling symptoms like this though like a regular service or automotive tune up just isn’t going to go deep enough to find out what is happening here.
In this case, there was some carbon build up in the idle air control valve that needed to be cleaned out, but since that requires some labour we wanted to be sure that was the problem first. For this we used an idle air control motor tester, which basically helps us narrows down the issue by ruling out electrical problems, solenoid connections, or hose and vacuum leaks. Once we figured out it was none of them, the cleaning of the valve was underway and proved to be the issue.