Hope it's okay to bring this topic up again. Anyway I stumbled on this forum while looking into how common of a problem Honda Fit/Jazz have had with a cylinder valve going bad as I was felt mine has had happen (more on why I thought this below). What I didn't expect was to find that an issue with the EGR valve was extremely common. That brings me to wonder if someone here can maybe help me decide if it's worth trying to check out the EGR valve or not. Please note this is for my wife's 2008 Honda Fit Sport (as implied, I'm in USA) with 110k miles.
Primary symptom is when the engine is cold (especially noticeable when the weather is also cold) rough idle (sometimes very rough), stalling when under in gear sometimes dying, even just dying when stopping. Note that once the engine is warmed up the issues all pretty much disappear as my wife has never complained of them when it's warmed up and it never does it to me when warm. Also she claims the Lucas fuel injector cleaner does help it behave better (I was thinking maybe valve with deposits that won't clear). Also I swear it sounds like has a slight pinging sound inside that used to never be there(I could just be hearing things). If driven cold too many times in a row, fuel economy will suffer, otherwise it sticks pretty close to 28-30mpg mixed driving. As of late, the last couple times my wife took off without letting it warm up enough, the engine stalled enough to cause the power brake boost to fail, so she had a frightening stop, thankfully no one was in front of her and no cross traffic. I did verify with a mechanic that all of the braking components are good.
Last year when this first presented itself as a large issue during cold weather (hesitation for probably a good year before this with issues trying to die, but not, on stopping) I decided to change the coils since the plugs had just been replaced(even went for premium plugs). It was still having issues so I tested compression and found Cylinder 1 had terrible cold compression, but fine compression when warmed up (rest were fine). At this time the engine finally started throwing miss fire codes, usually random, though sometimes it would give Cylinder 4 (wasn't sure if someone had messed up programming or wiring at that time). I've since seen it give other cylinder numbers as well on the miss fire, but that's it code wise. Since my brother-in-law is a mechanic(has his own shop), I talked with him and his thought was probably a valve not sealing correctly in the cylinder when cold. I then spoke with a Honda dealer to get a quote on fixing the issue, and as expected they said replacing the head was cheaper, though they then noticed it was even cheaper to just replace the engine.
Given the braking issues now occurring, I was looking again at the cost of going ahead and replacing the engine, but before doing so decided I better check to make sure this wasn't a common problem (last thing I want to do is install a "new" used engine only for it to start failing too) and discovered this forum. With that, I'm hoping maybe someone here can say if all these symptoms could easily be worth my time this weekend to deal with the cold and pull the EGR valve off, clean it, and then clean anything else related to the EGR.
Thanks!