Secondary air pump drama
 

Under the "don't do what I did" or "I should follow my own advice" headings! ;)
I recently bought a SKP brand secondary air pump and check valve to replace the noisy original air pump (470,000 km.) Everything looked pretty good but it turned out the SKP air pump did not pump enough air to open the SKP check valve. After about 3 hrs. of messing around on a 1/2 hour job, I found that BOTH were at fault. The original air pump could open the SKP check valve but only about 1/2 way and the SKP air pump could only open the original check valve a tiny bit! What a bunch of crap! btw you can only activate the air pump in INPA with the engine running.

Very understandable trying a knock off. OE on that part is stupid expensive.

Somebody gave me a SAP from a 7 series and it took very little work to modify to fit. Just got rid of the eternal filter since the 7 series one has it built in. Gives you an option if you have a junk yard possibility. I had to drill a hole or two in the mounting plate as the pump is oriented like 60° different angle but it worked perfectly. I think the 5 series that era is the same part.

Good luck solving, it was a very noisy month or two before I got my SAP swapped. Suck on the double failure and the time to find but somebody is going to see the thread in the future and they will take 45 min. vs. 3 hours to diagnose.

Supposedly the bearing can be replaced vs. the whole pump but I couldn't figure out how to take it apart non destructively.

It first got noisy years ago I'm guessing at about 270-300k km so I ordered both the Pierburg pump and check valve from FCP but only had time to change the valve at first and surprisingly the pump got quiet again so a year or 2 later I sent the Pierburg pump back! I wouldn't doubt that the original would still be good if I had caught the valve earlier and the pump hadn't got a good dose of exhaust through it. So learned that lesson! ;) I'm thinking too that the facelift air pump is much more expensive because it probably is much improved over the previous years. Anyway, original is back on and much quieter with some lube sprayed through it for now. :)

I don't know about Canada but in most US states you can pass emissions with 1-2 readiness monitors not set, so just deleting the SAP and coding it out are sufficient. All the SAP does is heat the catalytic converter up faster

It's working fine with the old pump, just noisy, the cheap new parts were setting codes of course. We don't have any emissions testing here but I'm not looking to delete it regardless.

Mine set codes for two new pumps. Codes finally cleared with a Hella pump from RockAuto. Codes have not come back since.

We dealt with the noisy until it finally failed. It was just kinda funny that for 90-120 seconds sounded like air start on a jet engine. Before it failed a buddy gave me sap from a 7 series I was very happy to figure out how to mount it so I didn't even have to buy even a junk yard model.

So I ordered a new Pierburg pump from Rockauto to use up my credit and all is good! :) So quiet that it was hard to tell if it was even running until I opened the hood and heard it stop :) I'm gonna wait until my next order from FCP to get the Pierburg valve (Rock Auto didn't have) so that should all be good for the rest of the life of the car ;)

Is there a way to delete these stupid things on these cars and not get a check engine light or an emissions monitor not ready? I did it on the E36 but had to buy a tune for it. This is a few years later and may be harder to get rid of. There are also some posts about a simulator device to trick the car.