Contaminated petrol....

[DazVR6]

Just seen the news, apperently its affecting thousands of drivers all over the country.....anyone affected?

[animaniac]

I've seen it in the news aswell, i think its all being blown out of proporsion and according to the paper it says ford and vw's arnt affected, mostly french renault and vauxhall.

They have found the cause silicon in the petrol but i think a good strong injector cleaner would disolve the silicon and stop this problem.

Aswell as getting the engine and exhaust hot and burning the contaminants from the lambda probe.

I think dealers are rubbing their hands at the thought of extra business, a merc owner got charged £1000 for replacement of 2 lambdas and an maf!

It's unlikely that the silicon damages the lambda otherwise vw's would be affected, i think the design of lambda plays apart by allowing clogging.

You can also use a blow torch to burn any contaminants off the lambda tip by holding it in the flame for a few seconds and then pulling it out for 5 seconds and repeating, this stops the probe from getting too hot.

Obviously dealers wont clean them they replace them, technicaly theres probably nothing wrong with them apart from being clogged up bit......

[kittie]

I always try to use Shell petrol anyway, around here it's the same price as supermarket, or maybe 1p more.

Plus tescos petrol station always has massive queues, despite the other day actually being 1p more than the nice quiet Shell station 

Weird!

[neil_1821]

If you do have problems with contaminated fuel i may have a small soloution to your problems, instead of getting garages to charge you tonnes of money.

Friend of mine, his next door neighbour had this problem, checked spark plugs, everything to make sure it was running and sure enough there was some white sh!te on the oxygen sensor, so they stuffed some redex in the tank, ran it and 20 minutes later it was clear, just buy some redex and run it with that, a lot cheaper than having new sensors.

[Agreeable Slick]

alternatively don't do that, and risk ruining your cat. Just remove it yourself, bath the tip of the sensor in some concentrated redex or similar and then put it back in.

Overall cost = £5.

[GT3 Turbo]

doesn’t surprise me that it was French cars that were mainly effected...

prime example of what happens if a tanker captain doesn’t clean out his tanks after shipping diesel fuel.....

[rich mk3]

got a cheque for a new cat, lambda, plugs and the cost of the fuel

[SpearMintTom]

This was mainly effected in the east / south east where the fuel comes in from the north sea.. East Anglia has very cheap fuel prices as it's one of the first places the fuel arrives at, I was putting in Tesco's unleaded fuel as it was the cheapest in the region at 81.9p a litre at one stage..

Put a full tank in and 1/2 way through it my engine died on me driving down a hill - took it to Norwich VW Centre, who frankly were a bunch of f*ckwits and told me that my engine was dead and I should throw it away.

All it needed was to empty the fuel tank and adjust the fuel/air ratio, then put some redex in afterwards, fuel treatment and a decent tank of fuel not from sh*tty tescos and it was fine.