Ladies and gentleman, Hobos and tramps,
cross-eyed crickets and bow-legged ants,
I come before you to stand behind you,
To tell you something which I know nothing about. . . .

Well, we'd been getting the ETC# P0441 on our 2004 Mazda6 V6 3.0 engine. We replaced the purge valve easily enough. Here's a link to a good posting on the location and replacement of the purge valve.

purge valve?

Had to do a little fumbling around to replace it, but it wasn’t that difficult and you could get to the purge valve by standing on either side of the car and bending way over, reaching around to the back of the engine towards the top.

Once we replaced the purge valve, we started getting ETC# P0443. Apparently the valve solenoid was also bad (Mazda part # Z504-18-741A). The only problem is we couldn't find any decent pics of the location of the “valve solenoid”. We found several different conflicting descriptions of where the valve soleniod was located, but we finally found it. So, here are a few pics of it both before and after replacement.

Again, this is for a Mazda6 V6 3.0 engine. It’s really simply to replace, but just as with the purge valve noted above, you have to do a little fumbling around to replace it. It is located on very top of the engine a little to the right. You don’t even have to take the engine cover off to replace it. You simply unscrew the one nut off of the threaded stud, disconnect the electrical plug and the two hoses (squeeze and slide the two hose clamps down the tube and slide the tubes off of the solenoid’s nipples), and install the new one.

The first pic below shows the valve solenoid in my hand.

The second pic below shows the new valve solenoid lying next to the old one that is still in place at the lower right crook in the black hose that looks like it has a Phillips head set screw sticking out of the top.

The third pic below shows both old and new valve solenoids side-by-side.

The fourth pic below shows the new valve installed and the old valve laying to the left.

It only took about 10 minutes to replace.

I suppose, as one posting described it, there could be a second duplicate valve solenoid on the passenger side of the engine compartment right on the engine side of the wheel well next to the fire wall and below the air-conditioning refrigerant line, but I couldn’t find it. Maybe the guy was describing a 2.3 4-cylinder engine? Again, ours is a V6 3.0 engine.

Now, after having had ETC #P0441 and P0443 and after having replaced both the purge valve and the valve solenoid, we’ve got an ETC #P0305. Apparently the coil pack on cylinder #5 needs to be replaced.

Could this have been the root cause of our Mazda 6 problems? Did the failure of the coil pack cause the failure of the purge valve and valve solenoid?

Maybe.

Then again maybe not.

Either way, we’ve got over 160,000 mostly trouble-free miles on our 2004 Mazda6 since we bought it new in 2005. All three of these items probably should be replaced as routine maintenance. So far we’re out about $181: $14 for the purge valve, $92 for the valve solenoid and $75 for the coil pack, but we almost undoubtedly came out cheaper by using forums like www.mazdaforum.com and doing the work ourselves rather than having the dealers do the work. If we'd had a dealer replace these three items, I'd guess, based on some of the postings I've read, we'd be out of almost $1,000+/-.

The fact is, from what I’ve been reading on these forums, we probably need to replace the coil packs anyways, especially the ones on the back of the engine. According to one posting by a fellow who said he was a Mazda tech, the coil packs on the back side of the engine tend to fail more often than the ones of the front side of the engine. He said he suspected it was due to an extraordinary amount of heat buildup on the backside of the engine verses the heat buildup on the front side of the engine.

I hope this posting and pics helps some of y’all out, but remember:

Ladies and gentleman, Hobos and tramps,
cross-eyed crickets and bow-legged ants,
I come before you to stand behind you,
To tell you something which I know nothing about. . . .

 

This will certaily be very helpful for me in the near future.

 

Thanks for posting this. It helped me fix the P0443 code on my 2004 6S (140k miles). Like supercarver said, removing the engine cover is not necessary, but it'll provide a little more room to work on the valve solenoid. I had some trouble removing the two hoses, since there is not much "slack" on the hoses. Ended up using a flat head screw driver to push the hoses off.

Although I didn't need to replace my purge valve, here is the part number in case any one needs it: BP4Y-18-741.

Thanks again for this great post!

 

nice!

 

could I get the links to the installation for my 2004 Mazda 3 purge valve installation?