Phew! 0.07L Unleaded...but how close can you go.... (1 Viewer)

[zen navigator]

Hi,

Had a close call at the weekend. Put 0.07L Unleaded into the MH. No sooner had I squeezed the trigger, I realised A frantic look at the counter and was reassuranced I got away with it. Blamed the missus for talking to me at the same time...happy to admit I can't multi task

You read about people who say a wee drop of the green stuff is good for the diesel. Now is that historical advice and would be a bad thing for newer common rail \ tdi engine?

How much can you get away with in times of Unlead to Diesel ratio before having to call out the A team. My close call was 1: 650 or thereabouts. How close could you go?

Thinking of adding some diesel additive just to be on the safe side.:Cool:

 

[kennygd]

oh:How lucky can you get spotting it just in time.
kennygd

 

[gazz]

on the old diesels, 20 to 25% was fine and recomended in the handbooks for winter conditions (in norway or similar places, not england)

the common rail jobbies tho are a lot more fussy, tho i do wonder exactly how fussy they are,

someone on a biodiesel forum recently posted his story, he'd been running his 3 year old car on biodiesel for over a year, one day it became sluggish, stalled then refused to start, engine managment light was on,

at the dealers they read the fault codes, about 10 of them, and pronounced the low pressure fuel pump dead, high pressure pump dead, all injectors dead and so on, and gave him an estimate for about 2.5 grand to replace the entire injection system, telling him it was his fault for running on bio.

he refused to accept their diagnosis, and got the car taken back to his house, where he got hold of the software to read the faults on his laptop, there he looked at the timings of the faults being recorded, firstly the low pressure pump registered a high current draw, then a loss of pressure fault, then the high pressure pump reported low pressure, the rail then reported low pressure, and each injector reported low pressures and shut down.

so he started at the first item, the low pressure pump, he got a new one, cost him 75 quid, 20 minutes to fit it, he cleared the fault codes, turned the key, and the system primed, and he started it, no more fault codes registering.

the problem, the windings in the low pressure pump had shorted out, causing the initial high current draw fault, the pump stopped and thus the pressure in the system dropped, and each component in turn reported low pressures,

turns out that particular car has a lot of reported low pressure pump failures, 99% of them on cars run on dino diesel, but the garage just heard 'bio diesel' and figured that was the cause,

just a sign of the times it seems, modern mechanics are really fitters, they plug in their magical computer and believe what it tells them, dosent matter to them that they replace 2 and a half grands worth of perfectly good components, in that process they will have changed the one faulty component and thus fixed the vehicle,

anyway i've gone way off topic here, hopefully someone will come on and say exactly what happens to the components when fed with petrol, other than the ecu throwing up faults like wrong pressures, cylinders not firing and thus shutting down the injectors for safety etc, where the remedy would be to replace the entire injection system, flush the system out, clear the fault codes and proudly proclaim the job fixed, when really it just needed flushing, filter changes and ecu resetting

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[zen navigator]

According to the AA:

Generally a small amount of incorrect fuel should not damage the engine as long as you have not started the car and top up fully with diesel fuel.

• If you've added more than 10% (5 litres in a 50 litre tank) petrol – Drain the tank and refill with diesel

Might go back and add some more Unleaded as it is 1p a litre cheaper

Dave