What You Didn't know about IDLE CONTROL with Holley EFI!

but if we flip this switch before we look at some examples, let's quickly talk about

what

the IC valve is and

what

it's capable of, so at the end of the day the entire

idle

control

valve is a

control

led vacuum leak. a valve that opens and closes depending on how you program it, but the most important thing and what you should keep in mind is that with the

idle

control valve completely closed no air passes through it and with the idle control valve When open, that is all the air that valve can flow in many cases.

I think a lot of you are looking for the idle control valve to do a lot more than it's actually capable of, so in this video I'm going to write to show you some of the differences using an engine simulator to eliminate the engine in How the equation actually works, it will be much easier to paint a picture of how this works, then we'll do a couple of examples in a Obviously, I can't go over every setup and every detail in a YouTube video, so if I'm going too fast for you or you would like to see some of these settings broken down a little more if you click on the link in the description below, I can email you a PDF where I have broken down a lot of these things a lot more.

Oh, we have to slow down. Let's take a look at some of these options and see how. idle control is actually working and hopefully it will allow you to understand what is really happening and what is possible, what is not and how to look at the data and figure out what you need to change to get your car to idle. the way you want. I'm going to use Terminator X for this, since that's what I've connected to the simulator. The HP Dominator software is almost identical and the sniper software is basically the same, except we actually have a couple less options. makes it a little bit easier, so let's take a look at the IAC parked on a real running car, basically that leaves us with this IEC configuration tab to play with here in the simulator, so the first thing we need to do is to configure our data monitor so we can keep an eye on what's happening and

know

what to change.

If you click on this little e here, we'll just drag some of these channels so we can see them all. the real time data now I'm going to assume that your fueling and stuff has already been taken care of if you want to monitor coolant temperature and oil pressure, any of the health type things, obviously you can include that in this, but for In this example I'm just putting in the idle related things that you absolutely must look at, so we're going to want TPS RPM, Target Idle Speed, IAC Position and Ignition Timing and if you want you can also put in the timing base here. the base timing is what is in the ignition table and then the ignition timing is what is actually happening and if you are using spark based idle control you will see that these numbers are going to change so that is the most easy to see how much it is. changing now that we have all these channels here, the last thing we want to do is give this a name, since it's all our idle control things, only one name makes sense, now you can see here on the left, we can take a look. on all those channels that we just put on that monitor, so the first thing you want to do is pick an idle speed that works for the car, the engine, the cam, the combo and all that good stuff, and you better get started . high and going down and if you go and get into your grandmother's Toyota Camry or any modern car, you will notice that cars will idle higher when the coolant temperature is cold, so you may want to do something about along the way. lines of this and let's say we'll call 180 degrees heated, you can feel a real value, so you'll see that it will decrease with the coolant temperature, but for this example we'll just set everything to a fixed 1000 RPM, which will make it easier to see some of the other demos, so we'll start here with the spark idle.

I usually turn this off when I'm first tuning the engine and once I have everything idling the way I want, I'll re-enable it. My process for how I do idle control will change from car to car because some cars are really difficult to keep idling the way you want and others are nice and simple so we'll leave this enabled since I'm about to show you how. works this and we'll go to the ignition table and you can see that everything is set back to 20 just for demonstration purposes so you can see how this idle control timing works well.

First thing I'm going to notice that our base time is 20, like I said, that's what's in the table and then our ignition time is 12. So those don't match if we turn off this idle Spark it goes back to 20. I

didn

't see Obviously this spark at idle is the reason the timing is removed and if you look at our target idle speed and then the actual engine RPM, the engine RPM is higher so you are trying to adjust the timing to reduce speed. What we need to notice here is that our TPS is at zero percent, so notice what happens if we increase the TPS and two is the magic number here, so it's one, no change, two now everything is jumping and once which exceeds the two, you can see our idle spark. now it has disabled itself so now our actual ignition timing matches our base timing again so lower our TPS now you can see we have an eight degree difference here so now watch what happens when We dropped below our target idle speed, now you see that. we just go eight degrees in the opposite direction, so basically our idle spark is plus or minus eight degrees and changing these P and D terms doesn't change that eight degree oscillation, it just changes the type of speed at which time is added and subtraction and we go into this in a lot more detail in my course, we basically have a video on each of these settings, so if you want to simplify this yourself just to understand it, you can basically set the D term to zero. or match what you are doing with the p term so that it is a p term of 40. notice what happens if we make a p term of one, now you can see how much slower the ignition timing moves and it is basically directly proportional to how far from the target we are, so if we change this to 80 without the RPM moving, you can see it shoot up to our maximum of eight degrees if we go to two, three, four, so you can see how to change that number again It's going to dictate how fast or how slow it adds or removes the ignition timing based on how much air there is and if we're going to, I'm not saying 60 on the P term, we do the same thing on the D term because there's no change. . five unchanged 50. 100 so you can see what the D term does is not as aggressive as what the P term does.

The p term is the star of the show here, so don't be afraid to move this number around and see how the car reacts, you can do this well if you also have the IAC control here. Here's a big one that a lot of people are afraid to experiment with and you're really shooting yourself in the foot by doing that, so we want to set our Type ISD to whatever we're using and you'll see that here's an option for none, it's Excellent for diagnostic purposes, if you ever have idle control problems, simply turn off the idle control valve or disconnect the cable. control valve and see what happens and that can let you

know

if your problems are related to the idle control or if they are related to the actual way the engine is running so I'll leave this at step by step but the idle control advanced is the one you can play with and everyone always leaves this on whatever the drop down option is for their idle control valve, so what we're going to do now is show you the difference between some of these.

So you can see you can click on whatever you want and ultimately what all these drop down menus do is change these PID control settings, so if you're feeling crazy you can go in here and adjust all of this yourself, but The dropdown menus actually do a good job of giving you some starting points. Well, let's keep this simple. All of this ISD tapering stuff would technically have an effect on this if we were to include TPS into the equation, but all I do. What we want you to do is look at the IEC position here, so at 3000 RPM we are going to go below our target idle speed so it will try to increase the IC position as fast as it is programmed or designed to do if we go back down, look how slow and how long it takes for the IC position to get up to 100 and in this case I'm talking about how the IEC control valve isn't magic if that motor was dropping and trying to stop.

That slow ramp of the IAC, which you know, over the course of several seconds, is not going to be enough to stop it, so the engine has to work fine on its own and then the IEC valve is just to stabilize it. It is not like this. a brick wall that will keep the engine from stalling, that's good now, let's go slow down and do the same. You can see this is going a lot slower than before so I'll be old and dead before it gets to 100. Now we're going to go fast and go back down and you can see it got to 100 over the course of I don't know it was a second so which when looking at this, you might naturally think how quickly would be better to prevent. the engine stalls, but a lot of times what ends up happening is if you're too aggressive with it, it's going to overshoot, overshoot, absolutely overshoot, and then you'll get that idle boost, all good, going down.

I'm not going. I go into a lot of depth on this stuff as I cover everything in that PDF, so download it, but I want to show you a couple of things here, so basically once our engine RPM drops below target, it will open idle mode. control valve and if it is too high it will lower it, but what is a little interesting is that the actual behavior of the IEC position once it reaches its target will change depending on how far away it was before reaching the target. What did he say? Let's show you what I mean here so that our target and the actual RPM of our engine match, so that our IC position stays at a fixed value, it doesn't move, so as far as the computer is concerned , we are taking 42 percent of IEC. position to reach our idle target, but notice what happens once we move away from our target and then back to our target, you would think the IEC position would end up in the same place, but it doesn't bring it back now. it's at eight, in the other direction, bring it back to 41.

So that's something to keep in mind in theory, once the engine is running this should match up much better, but it just gives you a little bit of perspective on how does it work. The next thing we're going to see is that we're going to increase the RPM of our engine to a pretty high level. Now you'll see that our IC position is at zero because things were idle at 5000 RPM, but notice what happens once we raise our TPS above that. Two percent comes up and you can see it stopped at 40 and this is one of the things that scares everyone because when they drive their IC positions to 40 percent and go crazy, it never ends, but if you look back up here in our IEC holding position is not a coincidence and the next thing we will see here is if we took our TPS to 5 4500 RPM, if we lowered our TPS to zero, nothing happened, the IAC is still maintained at 50 percent, there is where this number here comes into play, so I used a thousand RPM as our target idle speed to make the math easier for you, so we have a thousand RPM here, a thousand RPM here, so if we add those two together, it's 2000 RPM, I know.

Think about this while you are driving and now we are going to stop so we let off the throttle and our RPM drops when you see the holes, now we are just above 2000 RPM, now look what happens so soon. as we drop even one RPM below that, we have now re-entered our idle control mode, so realistically looking at this stupid little data screen will be almost impossible while driving the car, so if you don't you are using the data logging feature in your EFI system should be the primary key to success. I'm going to do two records real quick, one using our advanced idle control, slow, the other using fast and I'll show you how we can overlay those on top of each other and that's how you really start to dial in your idle control as you can overlay things. and see what changes you're making and what effect they're having on the idle, so we need to set up a graph with all of the same channels that we previously hadn't done anything over time, so we won't worry about that now and we have to give it a name again, poop again and now you can spend as much time as you want analyzing all of this.

So now you can see here that the actual RPM of our engine is higher than our idle speedtarget, so our IEC position is zero and then the actual engine RPM drops below the target idle speed, so it progressively raises the idle control valve and then reaches 100 because there was no change in RPM real engine, but since there is a division between the two, we will try to introduce the ISE valve. Now let's activate the quick dropdown menu and overlay it on top so you can actually see the real thing. world how powerful the comparison tool on the data logger is the same thing you see here that our engine RPM dropped below target.

We have these two points basically aligned. Look at how much faster the ISE increased on the dotted line in the comparison file. and the solid line is the initial file, so if you use the timestamps we click here, you can see that the ISE control valve basically went from zero to 100 in 1.4.seconds and this low setting took 10.7 seconds , so there is a gigantic difference in how those settings will control the idle control valve, so don't be afraid to experiment with them. Next we have the IEC parking position and you can see this is cold and has a temperature.

Based also, this is the equivalent of putting your foot on the accelerator when the engine is cold, so for this we're going to jump in here and I'll show you basically what zero percent and 100 do in an engine. and you can see what the difference is now, this car here is drive by wire, but it works exactly the same, only instead of having an idle control valve, it just opens and closes the throttle to react the same way it does. I would make an idle control valve. This car starts perfectly normal in hot and cold with normal IAC park position values, so for this first test here we are going to try with the IC part only at zero percent and see if it starts and runs.

I suspect it probably will. It might struggle a little bit and then we'll turn it off, set it to 100 and then start it again and see if we can't bounce this thing off the rev limit or turn it on so let's see what happens the main thing we're looking at here are the engine RPM, okay, actually it was okay that it

didn

't start. I made a carburetor, changed those fuel injections for now, let's do the same. in the 100 ISE position, it was obviously not enough, the car wouldn't even start and Run 100 was too much, the car was idling very, very high, so the adjustment process would be to find that middle point where the car starts from the way you want and then also keep in mind that this is cold and based on temperature, so you'll have to figure out what that magic value is at each different coolant point now, especially with drive-by-wire and custom tables , is where you can actually get the thing to do what you want it to do, which is good, so I'll show you a quick example on that real quick and then we'll wrap this up so you can see here that the car is idling nice and quiet. . and my respectable neighbors wouldn't want to fight me, but if we flip this switch, I can slide in a custom table and now we can drink Busch Light and grow a mullet, if we really want to go crazy, we could go to switch number three.

We put in a verbal melody and then we could drive to the top of a mountain and throw the car off the side to make the world a better place, but with custom boards you can basically create any offset based on anything and this situation. I only have it on a switch for demonstration purposes only. No I won't be driving a car like this foreign guys so this is how your idle control works so definitely make sure you pull down the description to get that PDF. I can get a little more detailed breakdown of what the different tables and setups are and if you're interested in learning a lot more and watching basically individual videos on each of these setups and so on, I have a whole course.

Leave a link in the description for that too, but as you can see the idle control is hands down the most tedious part of the tune up and for example if you take your car like you drive it to a tuner and he tunes it in the same way. day and then you leave, he won't have the ability to adjust any of these idle control tables based on coolant temperature, so the Holley idle control is pretty straightforward if you're familiar with the subject, so you can make your most informed guess. as to what you're going to want to need at lower coolant temperatures, but if you really want to dial your car 100 exactly the way you want it, the way you like to drive it, it seems like it's really the only true way to do it.

That's doing it yourself, so the more you can learn about these things, the more adjustments you can make and the happier you will be.