CEL thrown for temporarily disconnecting things

[127.0.0.1]

Originally Posted by jmjonesey

Hey guys and gals, just a quick question, heres the back story

I took off my passenger side front wheel to repair a tire, which by the way was the first time I ever used the soapy water trick :-) to find the deeply embedded brad nail. Anyway, while I had it off, I figured it was about time to clean and re-oil the air filter, as I have several times before (K&N ftw) with no problem.

I figured while I was doing that I would remove the airbox and get it out of the way and put some fresh lithium grease on the shift assembly moving parts on the tranny, naturally this involved removing the MAF connector.

While I was doing that I figured I would put some electrical tape over all the other connectors I could find (Alternator, other devices, etc) basically just wrapping up exposed wire.

Well, I got it done, all put back together, started the car up, and noticed it was throwing a CEL....so I figured well wtf, I checked all the connections, everything was clipped in, no frayed wires.

I decided to try to reset everything by pulling the battery cables, waiting 10 minutes, and hooking them back up... which I assume resets the ECU because it did fix the CEL (for now, which is why I am asking in this thread) along with my radio station presets, etc.

Just curious, was this the correct method for straightening this out? I am assuming that the ECU detected that the sensors stopped sending data..even while the car was off...and that's why it threw the CEL?

1) While I was doing that I figured I would put some electrical tape over all the other connectors I could find (Alternator, other devices, etc) basically just wrapping up exposed wire.

shouldn't really need to do this as moisture can now get trapped and have a hard time drying out and could lead to accelerated corrosion, if your tape becomes a trap.

2) Just curious, was this the correct method for straightening this out?

the correct method is an OBD-II CAN protocol scan tool to determine the exact MIL code(s) being thrown

3) probably fine if you go three tanks of your normal driving patterns and the MIL doesn't come back