The first thing you’re all wondering is why we’re doing a write-up on taking a performance part off, and returning it to stock. Good question, but I can assure you it isn’t because the part was bad or that we had some issue with it. Let me explain a bit more.
The factory Turbo Control Value on the P1 Volvo is mounted on the turbo housing, exposing it to excessive heats. Further it is made of plastic which means it can fail pre-maturely at any time. The Elevate Turbo Control Valve addresses both of these design flaws with a solid metal construction, as well as changing the mounting point up on the firewall, where temperatures are much cooler. We had purchased this unit about 10 years ago. Long story long, it was time to replace the upgraded unit. It had reached it’s end of life. Maybe a bit quicker on our car since we do drive it pretty hard, and try to stay a peak boost as much as possible.
So, while we order a new unit from elevate and have it shipped, we still need to drive the car, and without a working boost controller, the boost is erratic and sometimes not even present. We did have a stock controller we plucked from our M66 donor laying around, so all that was left was to put it back in.
The problem is, we are putting the stock unit back as a temporary fix. If we were going straight Elevate to Elevate no problem, we simply just match the hose positions to the new unit. However, the stock unit is laid out differently, so we were forced to figure out which hose went where. We went over to ElevateCars.com, and as always, they have awesome full color PDF instructions, and we grabbed those to document a reverse install. You can see their P1 Turbo Control Valve Instructions.pdf here.
We’ll just go in order and give you the important hose routing when we get there. First few steps you know, jack up car remove tire, remove fender liner… but why, isn’t the TCV up top? Yes, but the Elevate unit comes with a longer wire extension to make it possible to mount higher in the engine compartment, so we needed to disconnect that harness connector, which was still way down, and un-reachable from the top.
From there we removed the nut holding the Elevate unit to the firewall and pushed it down so we could asses it from the wheel well. Now we are ready to swap the vacuum hoses and wiring.
The wiring is easy enough, a simply two wire harness that pops off, and pops on to your stock TCV. After we had matched the ports on the stock unit, to the Elevate unit via Elevate’s instructions, you simply remove one hose from the Elevate unit, and then plug it to the stock unit. Here we will explain the port match.
In the picture above you can see we used color zip ties to identify the hose to the wastegate, the compressor inlet and outlet all on the stock TCV. We then did the same on the Elevate unit so you can see. Further we did this a third time on the hose ends inside the engine bay. You want to make sure that when you pull a hose off, you know which port it goes back onto incase you drop it, or have to take an emergency #2 and leave it dangling. This will also help when your new Elevate unit comes in the mail for a quick swap over.
We hop into the wheel well, and swap all three hoses.
Lastly, since the Elevate unit we get will go back up on the firewall, we fished the factory unit back up and zip tie it to the mount bolt for safe keeping.
Overall, a quick and easy swap out, and since we left the colored zip ties on, when our new turbo control valve arrives, it should be a quick 10 minutes without having to get under the car. If you all are still running a factory TCV, it might be a good time to look at the Elevate upgrade, coming in under $100.
Further, while we were at it, we installed our new Elevate Compressor Bypass Valve (Blow Off Valve), which you can see here. And after our new TCV came in, we documented the installation here: Installing Elevate’s Performance Turbo Control Valve.
