2003 Chevrolet Malibu - More Fun with Error Codes (Error Code P0230)

Our younger son is toughing out the dregs of his senior year at Ohio University taking online classes while in quarantine. As if the poor kid hasn't been through enough with this whole thing, what with his senior year upended, graduation canceled and his summer internship put on hold until at least the fall, he called me about a week ago to tell me his car, a 2003 Chevrolet Malibu, wouldn't start. A mechanic in the town where the school is diagnosed the problem as a bad fuel pump and estimated $760 to fix it. Wow. And that's with a AAA discount. I thanked them for the diagnosis, paid $111 for the diagnosis and had the car towed two-hundred and five miles back home. No, I didn't technically  pay for it, AAA offers one "free" tow per family member per year up to two-hundred miles. I paid an additional twenty bucks or so for the overage. All in not a bad deal. I've used it once before in thirty-nine years of membership, might as well get my money's worth. 

I've done fuel pumps on fuel injected cars before and this one was, admittedly, on the tougher side of things. As with most fuel injected cars the fuel pump is inside the tank and you have to "drop the tank" to get access to it. Why is the pump on the inside of the tank? Who the hell knows. Anyway, some cars, like my 2002 Chevrolet Monte Carlo, have a trap door in the trunk over the tank for fairly easy access but most cars, surprisingly, do not. Not having a lift and the tank being half full didn't help matters either. Still, I got it out, the new pump, which ran me $80 at AutoZone, went in and with the help of my strapping, twenty-three old older son, got everything back together and ready to rock a joyous, six hundred dollar savings of a repair before dinner.

Much to my horror, the car wouldn't start after we finished. After I got over the initial shock of failure I feverishly scanned through my mind the steps we took reassembling everything. What could it be? You can't mix up the fuel lines, we were meticulous with our wiring, the mechanic who diagnosed the problem said the relay was good, all fuses were fine...what the fudge?!? I deduced, to my older son's dismay, it was a bad fuel pump. I consulted with my son's friend who's a Porsche mechanic and quite experienced for such a young man with all the foibles of American cars and he agreed, "bad fuel pump, Mr. Connolly. It happens. Especially on the cheap ones from AutoZone." 

However, to make matters worse, all reviews online that I found about the pump I bought were glowing. Why did I have to get stuck with a dud? I dismantled everything, pulled out the pump I bought and returned it to AutoZone and, of course, I got another one just like it. What are the chances two new cheapie pumps could be bad, y'know?

This time I hooked up the wiring for the pump first to test if the primer motor would kick on for one to two seconds when the ignition key was in "run". This is was with the pump still out of the car. Wouldn't you know it? Nothing. Zilch. Although, the fuel gauge was working which told me power was getting back there. Strange. It was at this point I decided to embrace my mantra of, "a tow-truck is my backup". I reassembled everything and dusted off my dented ego and called AAA for a tow to my wonderful mechanic Rick whose shop is less than three-miles from my home.

Before the tow truck came I reread the mechanic's diagnosis and I was fuming at myself for not checking it sooner. There was no print-out on the receipt that mentioned "bad fuel pump" but instead, "error code P0230". Autoservicecosts.com defines Error Code P0230 as a fuel pump primary circuit malfunction. "This indicates that the fuel pump primary circuit is experiencing a problem when it is commanded on/off. This code is usually set when there's an incorrect voltage detected by the PCM". In the thirty to forty minutes between my call to AAA and the tow trucks arrival I watched a couple of youtube videos of mechanics, or what appeared to be mechanics, trouble-shooting this error code and I quickly deduced that figuring out what it ultimately meant was a above my pay grade. I silently cheered as the tow truck left my driveway with the Malibu on its flat bed.

The next day Rick called and said the problem was not with the fuel pump but with the fuse box or "block" in the engine compartment that houses the relays. While the relay was fine, it appeared the port where the relay for the fuel pump goes had shorted out. How and why? Who knows. It's a seventeen year old Chevrolet; shit happens. He found a used block, installed it and the total came to just under, gulp, three-hundred dollars. More than I certainly wanted to pay but all in considering what I paid for the diagnostic and the "cheap" fuel pump itself, I'm still ahead of where I'd be had I gone with the mechanic down where my son goes to school. A long way around the block to save several hundred dollars but the net-net is some savings.

The cake frosting was that Rick, who's a wonderful human being, said that the short in the fuse block probably burned out the fuel pump. I had told him I changed the fuel pump twice and he may have been just saying that to be nice but I'm taking his comment as gospel since that infers I didn't waste my time or my older son's time swapping out the fuel pump twice. Furthermore, I have the piece of mind that there was no way in hell I was going to figure out the error code P0230 was pointing towards a bad fuse box.

If I've learned anything with these damn error codes and check engine lights is that the codes you get are a "symptom" of something that's wrong. Trouble codes give you little more information than to put you or a mechanic in the ballpark of where you need to be. The rest boils down to good old fashioned detective work.