Oil pressure location
 

I'm interested in adding a oil pressure warning light. My question is where I should pull the reading from.

1. Use an inline an adapter and pull right from the oil cooler line.
Or
2. Use the stock oil pressure location on the front.

I've looked at the galley plug on the top of the engine and am not comfortable bending the maf wires to gain the required clearance.

I'm not sure about the ramifications of removing the OEM sensor from the system.

Any thoughts?

Well the OEM sensor is just that, a warning light. I've heard you can remove it and no codes from the ECU.

But if you're going to remove it, might as well go with a full gauge that shows pressure all the time.

This. If it's the same as my '13 STI - you can remove the OEM dummy warning light sender and put in a real oil pressure sender. I had it working wonderfully with a Defi gauge and no warning lights/codes (on the STI).

This is 100% correct and the correct way to monitor pressure.

The idiot light basically means 'it's too late, dawg'.

Unplug the sensor, remove sensor, purchase galley plug adapter, add a proper gauge, done! :thumbsup:

OEM Galley Plug adapter: https://www.rallysportdirect.com/par...il-galley-plug

Oil pressure gauges: https://www.rallysportdirect.com/scp...D=Oil+Pressure

Support a local vendor, but that's a good way to look at what's out there.

Avoid prosport, consider AEM, Defi, and STRi.

JM.02

Look for an Innovative dual temp/pressure gauge.

There's an oil gallery plug just under and to the left of the air condition pump. This is the best spot to take an oil press reading.

I guess I'd rather have a light than a gauge I'll end up ignoring. I don't want to have to check it, I just want to be alerted if I lose pressure.

If I end going with a gauge this one is very high on my list.

By then it may be too late...

Maybe I don’t have a strong enough understanding of the oiling system but why would a drop in pressure show up on a gauge but not a warning light. That’s a bit of a rhetorical question as I understand the principal difference between a light and a gauge. I’m just not convinced that a gauge is going to alert me any faster. If I’m wrong, I’m wrong…..

For example; if an oil cooler line ruptured, would the system sustain enough pressure to not trip the light? How much (if any) is dependent on where the sensor is located, such as the oil cooler return line vs oil galley. Hence my original question.

I think the issue is that the light illuminates when you have, essentially, no pressure. I dunno what the exact level is, but the threshold to where it turns on is really low. That's like your TPMS sensor letting you know that you have 0 PSI in your tire, at which point you're already fucked. A gauge allows you to identify a DROP in pressure, but not one so severe that it causes engine problems. To use the TPMS analogy, that's like letting you know that your tire pressure has dropped to 25 PSI, which isn't catastrophic, but gives you a heads up that you might want to look into it before your tire essplodes.

Most aftermarket oil pressure sending units are 25 psi. With our cars idling as low as 5 psi a light will be on quite a bit of the time.

Right, that's a fair drawback, ignoring(or second guessing) the light at low rpm.

Pressure gauge or none, I've for years considered replacing the idiot light with a loud buzzer.

That would be a way to go. In my Minibusa track car I used a round LED tail light for a low oil pressure warning light. About 2" diameter. No way were you going to miss that baby.

Right? Takes discipline and practice to work a regular sweep of the gauges into one's routine. Those stupid little lights are worthless.

Many gauges have a warning function that you can set to whatever pressure you want. It's really worth paying a little extra to have that. For it to be useful it might need to be set where it is going off at idle though.

The older pressure switch came on at like 2.1 psi, which is essentially useless. The BRZ appears to also just use a warning switch and does not monitor actual pressure, for the dash warning light anyway. Seems like there may be an avcs/avls related oil pressure reading?

So yeah, pull that out and use the plug for the sensor. Keep in mind that a lot of gauges that use PSI for units use an NPT fitting while the stock sender is BSPT/PT. Prosport and Killer B make galley plug adapters that are NPT.

That's my resistance to just getting a gauge, I'm not going to check it while on track.

The longacher (accutech) SMI gauge has 3 stage alert plus wiring for an external light. Seems like it might be win-win

I like @Lunatic's bright light solution.

It's hard to check gauges when on the track. I had a gauge but also the 2" led light that would light up the sky if it came on.

iirc the OE sensor does read an actual number, wouldn't it be possible to get that number via OBD2 port, display it on a phone/tablet/AIM laptimer and write a warning light calculation/threshold having to do with psi/rpm? (20 psi at idle is cool, 20 psi at 6k rpm no bueno)

Best of all worlds, no tampering with OE sensors, a real gauge and logging actual numbers, and a dummy light that's actually useful so you're not distracting yourself on track.

Nope. It's just a switch.

:bonk:

Was thinking of oil temp being readable via OBD port, my mistake.

But, still possible to write a dummy light if you're running data logging capable of it.

:cheers:

Defi gauges have a buzzer when water/oil temp too high or oil pressure too low. You can set when it goes off

The defi standalone racer gauges do not have a warning- you need the advance link system for that. Aem X-series, prosport premium, and the upcoming greddy gauges have warnings off the top of my head.

AEM's failsafe wbo2 does a cool thing where it develops a safe curve of RPM, boost, and AFR, and then if the readings fall out of that range it cuts boost or switches maps or whatever. Having something similar that was oil pressure vs rpm based, possibly with a temp compensation would be handy. A few ECUs will do something like that actually.

Yea the advance BF series it what I was referring to. They also record up to 3 minutes and can view peak hi/low. The buzzer is decently loud too, unless you mount the box somewhere where it will be hard it hear. Only downfall is the box, it's not that big though.