My 2004 MT started fine today (approx. -2 celcius), after letting in warm up for a few minutes while I cleaned the snow off I went to leave and the CEL was on and the car was very slow to rev and had almost no power but was idling fine. Felt like a piston engine with one or more non-firing cylinders.

I had noted once a few weeks ago the CEL flashed for a moment under acceleration but disappeared, after searching on here I found that is often caused by misfires due to coil/cable issues. Going on this I used the pedal method to reset the (NVRAM?) memory thinking this might clear the misfire fault.
After doing this and restarting the car the engine responded normally however as expected the CEL remained on. Im thinking this is suggesting a coil on its way out? Does this seem logical or would resetting the NVRAM have no effect on this and the return to normal was coincidence?

Sorry I was not able to get a code for the CEL yet, just wondering if anyone had this same experience and can quickly enlighten me, Thanks!

 

what you've done and your line of thought seems very logical. (thanks btw for searching first)

If you have an auto zone or some auto parts store near you, they can most likely pull the code for you and tell you what it is.
my guess would be a bad ignition coil based on the fact that you had the flashing CEL and now a solid light.
how old are the coils? how many miles on your car? original spark plugs?

 

definitely ignition related if it hasn't caused you to cook your cat.

 

Should have included that, my bad, car has about 31000miles, coils are original as far as I know, and the spark plugs were changed by the previous owner(so I was told) so probably less then a couple thousand miles on them and maybe a year old.
I will be watching for the CEL to re-appear and have it checked as its gone now ( I had the battery disconnected) and look into testing the coils. Thanks for the replies!

 

30K miles is a common time for coils to start going bad I would definitely check them out