My thanks in advance as I have a limited knowledge on cars. Anyway I ran out of gas two days ago and my car shut off when I stopped in front of my house. I tried multiple times to start it and it would not start. I went to the gas station and put 5 dollars worth of gas in the tank and it still wouldn’t start.
So I ask the neighbor and he said it might have blown the fuel relay, which looks sort of similar to a giant fuse, I buy a new one and replace it and it still does not start. I talk to a few more people and they think the fuel pump needs to be replaced and they claimed when I tried to start it they could not hear it turn on. I am pretty confident that it is indeed the fuel pump that needs to be replaced.
My car is a 97 Toyota Celica and I have bought a new fuel pump. What I need to know is whether there is some access hatch (we searched for one to no avail) to the fuel pump to replace it or whether the gas tank would have to be dropped, and can this only be done at a shop? Any help would be appreciated.
I believe that in that car, the fuel pump is in the tank, and guess where it comes out? The top of the tank? Taking the tank loose isn’t any big deal, as long as it is full. Put the car up on some jack stands, there should be some strapping that you can see. Loosen the filler tube and any lines and wiring you see and lower it down slowly and see if there are any things that you need to losen along the top. If I remember correctly, the fuel pump is mounted on the sending unit. It really isn’t bad at all, just take your time.
Something you might want to try to do first is purge the air pressure from your fuel injector rail. If you have run it completely out of gas, it might have sucked some air in there and that can prevent the fuel from going where it needs to go. The fuel injector rail sits up on top of your engine’s intake manifold. The purge valve will look somewhat like a valve stem in a tire. If you gently push back on the needle valve in it, gas should spurt out a little. If your fuel pump is working to create pressure anyway. This is the same valve that someone with a fuel pressure gauge would screw onto and could read your pressure generated. If someone has one of those laying around, you could find out in a hurry if the pump is actually bad. I have had cars with 300,000 miles and many years older than yours and the fuel pumps stayed okay. But you never know.
It kind of makes me feel that you just might have some air in the lines instead of the fuel pump going out mysteriously right after you run it compeletly dry. I would check into this first because it is easy.
Just make sure that the negative battery terminal is unplugged and the car has completely cooled off for both of these proceedures. You don’t want to go kablam after all.
If the fuel pump is in the gas tank, then you will have to drop the tank to replace it. Fuel pump access will be from the top of the tank. Do you have to take it to a shop? That depends on your mechanical aptitude and access to tools. It’s a pretty straightforward job on most vehicles, but a tank with even a few gallons of fuel in it will be pretty heavy. Lowering the tank safely is the hardest part of the job.
At minimum you’ll need: jackstands, a good jack (both to raise the car for the stands and then to support the fuel tank as you remove/replace it), a board (to help support the tank while on the jack), a good ratchet/socket set, pliers, cans to store the gas (draining the tank completely after it’s removed will make re-installation much easier), and something to plug or crimp the fuel lines as they are disconnected. A helper is highly recommended, as it’s difficult to mind the jack, the tank and the bolts all at the same time. If you don’t have all these things (at minimum), I’d say take it to a mechanic.
Painful as it may be, it the pump is in the tank I would suggest taking it to a mechanic. When the tank is empty of liquid fuel it is still a bomb unless it is purged of the vapor. Fuel tanks are not to be messed with unless you have considerable mechanic experience.
Asian engineers are a lot more clever than American ones when it comes to electric fuel pump access. Remove the rear seat bottom cushion and you’ll see an access plate for getting to the fuel pump. Do not drop the tank – you cannot disconnect the wires from underneath. The trickiest parts of the job are carefully threading the fuel pump/sending unit assembly out and back in through the hole in the top of the tank, and not spilling a bunch of fuel in the seat area.
While a failed fuel pump is a reasonable possibility here, it’s not the only one. You can test for power and ground to the pump at the wiring connector under the seat. Test for these while cranking the starter; the pump may not be energized just by turning the key to “on.” If you have both power and ground, replace the pump. If you don’t, there’s an electrical problem to be resolved before condemning the pump.
I don’t know what it is about car threads that causes people to come in and speculate or post ridiculous misinformation. Most modern cars have an access panel to get at the fuel pump. Dropping the tank is absolutely not necessary, and to suggest dropping the tank suggests that the poster hasn’t got a clue or hasn’t worked on too many modern cars. The access panel in the Corolla is under the lower rear seat cushion.
All the previous comments about safety definitely apply. This is not a good job for a do-it-yourselfer.
Upon viewing GaryT’s response, I realize that my experience in replacing fuel pumps in newer vehicles is pretty much limited to Asian autos. Seeing as how I have no idea how widespread fuel pump access panels are in American cars, please replace “modern” in my previous post with “modern Asian” cars.
Any truth to the rumour that you can replace a failed in-tank fuel pump with an external tank fuel pump (like they used to sell at JC Whitney’s years ago for about $30)??----(as against paying about $400 to have the internal tank fuel pump replaced------drop tank, pain in the butt–yada yada yada --type of crap)?
----Just install that sucker somewhere under the hood and hook it up to the external gas line and you are good to go?
True or not?
Seems like no reason an external electric fuel pump could not easily replace an in tank kind --and for much cheaper.
The pumps you’re remembering were low pressure pumps for carbureted cars. Fuel injected cars use high pressure pumps, and if an external-mount one is available, it’s likely to cost considerably more than $30.
The high pressure fuel hoses used on fuel injected cars are generally not constructed in such a way that you can simply cut them and attach them to a pipe or pump fitting.
High pressure electric fuel pumps are designed to be good at pushing, not so good at sucking. That’s why they’re usually mounted in the tank – to minimize how far they have to suck the gas. Factory designs that used externally mounted electric pumps placed them very close to the tank, and some even had an auxiliary “pusher” pump in the tank. A pump mounted in the engine compartment has a big challenge sucking fuel all the way from the tank. Additionally, it would be trying to do this through the original pump and its partially clogged inlet strainer (“sock”), adding to the difficulty.
If it were a workable approach, I think we’d have seen a fair amount of such conversions. I never have.
By the way, pool, it would be wise to replace the pump inlet strainer along with the pump. After nine years, the original one is probably partially clogged, and during pump replacement is the ideal opportunity to put a new one on. The part’s fairly inexpensive, but sometimes it’s difficult to get it installed without damaging it.
Whaaaaat?
This makes no sense what so ever. The computer does not need to know fuel level, and even if it did, it would get that info from the fuel guage sender, same as your gas guage.
[hijack]
Q-Do you know how to make a million dollars in the car business?
A-Save a buck a car and build a million of them.
Common sense says that if the car maker could have used a $30 pump they would have.[/hijack]
The $30 dollar JCW special is for a car with a carb. Produces 2-3 Lbs of pressure.
Fuel injection systems run anywhere from 36-100 Lbs of pressure depending on the system. Also you have the problem that electric fuel pumps push great, but they don’t suck worth a damn. So mounting the pump outside the tank means you may very well have a problem supplying the pump with fuel. Many fuel injected cars with external pumps had to have a pre-pump inside the tank to supply fuel to the main pump.
So could you replace the $400 dollar pump with a $30 JCW pump? Sure. The car won’t run when you get done, but I have great faith that you could mount the pump and plumb it in.
Getting back to the OP. Silly dumb ass question. Is the car parked on level ground? If the car is not parked on level ground, the pickup may not be at the lowest point, and while you did add $5 worth of gas, the level has not reached the pickup yet. My sister ran her car out of gas once on a slope and it took about 4 gallons before the car would start.
Also replacing a fuel pump can be very dangerous work. I know of a car dealership that burned to the ground from a fire that started when a drop light fell and broke. The mechanic was removing a gas tank, and some fuel had spilled. When the drop light broke, it ignited the fumes near the floor. The mechanic dropped the gas tank so he could run away. Box score when it was all over was 27 cars to the ground, and the dealership only had four walls left.
As far as the suggestion to bleed the line of air, I have never heard of a gas engined car where this is necessary. There might be one out there, but I have never heard of it.
Thank you for the clarification. My fuel pump changing experience is limited to American makes, so my sweeping statement “If the fuel pump is in the gas tank, then you will have to drop the tank to replace it.” is wrong as well. I just changed the fuel pump on my 1996 Ford Windstar van and there is no access without dropping the tank. As Gary alluded in his post, rear seat access is more common in Asian vehicles than American. My question would be “why is that so?”.
Strange the pump in my 96 Escort is under the seat.
Are you sure that you didn’t hit something hard as well? My Escort also has a prime button I guess. If you hit something and the fuel cuts off you have to push a button in the rear of the car to get the pump to start working again. I’ve only ever heard about it on an Escort but that doesn’t mean it’s not on other cars.
It’s called a fuel pump inertia shutoff switch. Many (most? all?) cars have them. Their function is to deactivate the fuel pump when there’s a collision.
Boy, I wish I knew. There are any number of examples of things on cars that are a lot harder to get to than they need to be. You’ve got to wonder why some automotive engineers fail to use some of the good ideas out there.
There is not huge incentive to make them easy to work on, and there are a lot of design goals that conflict and cause serviceability to be compromised. Consider computers as an analogy. Consumer oriented vehicles are the equivilent of a laptop. Highly sleek, light, compact, highly integrated, and a total PITA to service.
On the other hand you have desktop/server class machines that are square, big, clunky, power hogs, that use genric multi-sourceable components, in standardized form factors, and are thus super simple and cheap to service, upgrade, etc. A garbage truck would be the vehicular equivilent of a server…absolutely functional, but warts hanging off of it everywhere and no pretense of “style”. Not much consumer demand for garbage trucks as a daily driver (hmmmm thinks kevbo, wonder where I could get an old one fer cheap?)
That said, putting the fuel pump inside the tank makes sense for a number of reasons. minor leaks from the connections or pump itself cause no trouble. It self primes because it is below and immersed in the fuel. It uses the fuel as a coolant, so it lasts a long time (good idea not to run most modern cars down to fumes on a regular basis for this reason).
Access panel for the fuel pump is a good idea…but is additional part to be installed, and therefore costs somebody money. By the time the expense of maintainance is discovered, purchase decision was long ago made.
