Psi power box ?

Hello Everyone.

Ok, picked up my 2002 Defender TD5 back in April of this year. No problems as such and couldn't be more happy after wanting one since i leant to drive in my fathers Series 3. Have been enjoying spending the time adding a winch bumper, aluminium steering guard and safari snorkel. Anyway on with the subject in hand.

After a few months i was having a poke around and found my way under the drivers seat to the ecu. Sitting their was a little blue box with psi moter sport written on it. Not knowing what it was i looked it up on google and found out. This in tern has led me onto here as i have a few concerns after reading a mixed bag of reviews about such items. The Defender was bought from a local 4x4 specialist here in devon and he mentioned nothing about the upgrade. Only that it seamed to drive better than a newer defender he had in stock. The rover only had 42000 at the time of purchase and the previous owner was a professional who used it as his second car. Just thought i'd shed a bit of history.

Anyway is this thing any good or not? Personally i don't like to cut corners and would rather go down the TD5 alive remap route or who ever comes highly recommended. Or do i have no worries and just carry on with it. I don't drive my car hard and fast but have noticed a big difference when driving my girlfriends fathers defender which is the exact same year and model.

So any advise would be much appreciated. Many thanks.

Kudrow said:

Hello Everyone.

Ok, picked up my 2002 Defender TD5 back in April of this year. No problems as such and couldn't be more happy after wanting one since i leant to drive in my fathers Series 3. Have been enjoying spending the time adding a winch bumper, aluminium steering guard and safari snorkel. Anyway on with the subject in hand.

After a few months i was having a poke around and found my way under the drivers seat to the ecu. Sitting their was a little blue box with psi moter sport written on it. Not knowing what it was i looked it up on google and found out. This in tern has led me onto here as i have a few concerns after reading a mixed bag of reviews about such items. The Defender was bought from a local 4x4 specialist here in devon and he mentioned nothing about the upgrade. Only that it seamed to drive better than a newer defender he had in stock. The rover only had 42000 at the time of purchase and the previous owner was a professional who used it as his second car. Just thought i'd shed a bit of history.

Anyway is this thing any good or not? Personally i don't like to cut corners and would rather go down the TD5 alive remap route or who ever comes highly recommended. Or do i have no worries and just carry on with it. I don't drive my car hard and fast but have noticed a big difference when driving my girlfriends fathers defender which is the exact same year and model.

So any advise would be much appreciated. Many thanks.

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Hi, welcome to the forum :welcome2:

Generally speaking, companies such as TD5Alive, Twisted Performance, Ali Sport and PSI Motorsport are all essentially in the same game, that being, to tune your engine and get as much power out of it as possible. TD5 Alive and Twisted Performance certainly know what they're doing but don't let all the marketing hype make you think that smaller, less 'heard-of' companies don't know a thing or two either. Essentially, all your little gizmo is doing is over-riding the Land Rover specified ECU program in order to deliver more fuel per cylinder before the piston reaches top dead centre. If you had a re-map from one of the larger companies they'd only really be doing the same thing but it might have cost the previous owner five times less to fit a PSI unit. The injectors in your TD5 engine are all electronically controlled and they only open and close when they recieve an electronic signal from the ECU. By opening the injector sooner (and therefore keeping it open for longer), more fuel is delivered into your cylinder and you get more power, per pot, per bang, as so to speak.

Tuning a TD5 engine certainly isn't a bad thing. Land Rover tend to limit every engine that they have ever produced, the 200Tdi and 300Tdi being two further examples which can be tweaked in order to create considerable power and performance increases. In some cases, delivering more fuel per cylinder will actually make the engine more economical because it produces more torque from the first cycle which then continues to increase (at a higher rate) through the rest of the revs. It shouldn't do any harm to your engine what so ever. If it's kicking out lots of black smoke when you are sitting at 50mph with no particular strain on the engine, then it will be over-fuelling (at least beyond your engines capability) but if it only smokes on startup and when you hastily accelerate away or when pulling up hills, this is perfectly normal.

Just enjoy it!
-Pos

Thank you for the reply. You have help to put my mind at rest.