Catlyic convertor

Recently a light came on in my 1996 honda. It was not the enige light. i read my manuel and it told me it may be the emmissons, I took to a mechanic and he said another year I should maybe get a new catlyic convertor when I was up for a smog check, he told me to put something in the gas tank , it was something like techron something, I did, and the car is still fine, it even was when the light was on, anyway he did someting on the computer and the light went off, now just yesterday the light came back on, what shoud I do? the car seems fine, it is still the same light.

Get a second opinion. If it is the converter, you’ve got to figure out why it went bad in the first place. Replacing the converter with diagnosing what caused the original to go bad will cost you more money.

Try to find a good exhaust shop to do the work. When my old Focus needed a converter the dealer quoted me $1,200. I had a small shop do it for $450 and had no problems.

Get another opinion from a different mechanic. Lots of people spend lots of money on catalytic converters they don’t need.

Techron is a fuel system cleaner. It’s one of the better products of its type, but it won’t affect the catalytic converter one way or the other.

When the light is on there are trouble codes stored in the car’s computer. These codes are diagnostic tools for a mechanic. There is NO CODE that says “catalytic converter is bad.” The codes may indicate that the converter is working incorrectly, but that’s usually caused by the failure of another component, such as an oxygen sensor, which is much less expensive to replace.

Turning the light off is easy…keeping it off is something different. To turn the light off all a mechanic has to do is reset the errors on the ECM. But if the problem is never addressed then the light will come back on.

You may or may not need a catalytic converter. There’s a good chance all you need is a O2 sensor. A faulty O2 sensor could give the same error as a bad catalytic converter.