u/Objective-Peach9969

Does this look normal? At full throttle the butterfly is only about 1/3 of the way open or less. Still trying to figure this power loss. I understand that the butterfly inside doesn't open all the way but should it open more than this?

Some folks are saying my third cat might be clogged. I read somewhere that I can test this by measuring the temperatures and compare the inlet and outlet temperature. If the inside part is hotter than the outlet part then I might have a bad cat. Anyone tried this before?

About two months ago I accidentally went over a puddle of water and my car died instantly. I had a drop down intake and I feel like water went in but not sure how far. The car was towed to a friend's shop. He inspected and dried everything up and cleaned the MAF since it was pretty wet. The car ran fine afterwards. A about two weeks later I start hearing rattling when I accelerate and after inspecting it I find that one of the cats is broken (Magnaflow headers) and I get a P0420 and P0430 codes along with a misfire on cylinder 5 and the car is running rough and idling very low. I pulled the plugs/wires and found a lot of oil in the spark plug wells. I replaced:

- Valve cover gaskets

- Spark plugs

- Plug wires

- coil boots

Then later I got a cylinder 3 misfire. We diagnosed it further and found a lot of coolant sitting in the spark plug wells for cylinders 1, 3, and 5. Turned out to be a leaking coolant hose above that area dripping into the wells. We fixed the hose/clamp, cleaned everything out, dried it completely, and the misfire is now gone.

Compression on cylinder 3 tested around 150 PSI, so engine seems healthy.

The broken cat from Magnaflow was under warranty took two months to arrive. So meanwhile I had some cheap no-name headers setup because my original cats were bad. The car still felt weak, had terrible MPG, and struggled uphill and I had a nasty exhaust leak. I assumed it was due to a poor design from the eBay headers.

Now I replaced those with Magnaflow headers again, but the car actually feels WORSE now.

Current symptoms:

- Starts immediately

- Idles perfectly smooth

- No misfire

- No CEL

- But the car has almost NO acceleration

- Feels extremely sluggish uphill

- Feels like something is clogged or restricted

The weird part is the engine sounds smooth and healthy at idle, but under load it feels completely gutless.

Any ideas what it could be? Or what should I test next or look at?

If you care, you can see my other posts related to this as it was happening.

Thanks in advance fellas