IS YOUR DPF LIGHT ON
SAVE MONEY RESTORE RATHER THAN REPLACE
Our DPF ultra clean machine will successfully clean all types of DPF filters including commercial vehicles, 4wd, medium and heavy trucks, buses and any machinery that has a diesel particulate filter.
It will remove the soot and ash from the filter restoring the DPF back to 98% original efficiently. There are many different types of diesel particulate filters, most of the ones on cars, light and medium sized trucks are sealed so can be difficult to clean.
Our DPF ultra clean machine effectively cleans any make and configuration of diesel particulate filters. Send your DPF to us for cleaning or bring your vehicle and we can test, verify the cause of the DPF being blocked we can remove, clean and reinstall and retest. We can provide a before and after flow test and report from our DPF ultra clean machine.
What is a diesel particulate filter?
- A diesel particulate filter (DPF) is a filter that captures and stores exhaust soot (some refer to them as soot traps) in order to reduce emissions from diesel cars.
- But because they only have a finite capacity, this trapped soot periodically has to be emptied or ‘burned off’ to regenerate the DPF.
- This regeneration process cleanly burns off the excess soot deposited in the filter, reducing the harmful exhaust emission and helps to prevent the tell-tale black smoke you used to see from diesel vehicles, particularly when accelerating.
- Euro 5 exhaust emissions legislation introduced in 2009 to help lower car CO2 emissions effectively made DPFs mandatory, and since then, around one in two new cars a year have been diesel-powered.
DPF Warning Symbol
- How do I tell if my diesel particulate filter is blocked?
- If the DPF is becoming clogged with soot or a fault develops in the system, an orange light will typically appear on the dashboard as seen below.
- They usually look like this with a piped box that has dots in the middle, although they can slightly vary by manufacturer, check your handbook for more information.
What causes a diesel particulate filter blockage?
- Short journeys at low speeds are the prime cause of blocked diesel particulate filters.
- This is why car makers often go as far as recommending city-bound short-hop drivers choose a petrol car instead of diesel (and it’s why diesels are something of a rarity in the city car sector).
- Other things that are bad for DPFs include poor servicing. A diesel particulate filter on a poorly serviced car may fail sooner than a well maintained one, generally, they should last for at least 160,000 Km.
- It’s important you use the right type of oil as well – some oils contain additives that can actually block filters.
- Performance modifications can damage a diesel particulate filter, as can using low-quality fuel and even running the car frequently on a low fuel level as the car may avoid DPF regeneration in order to save fuel.
DPF Blocked
- Ash and soot are fundamentally different materials, but both accumulate in the DPF. Removing each of these materials from the DPF requires completely different processes. Soot is normally removed from the DPF through regeneration, which burns off the soot, leaving the ash behind. Ash, on the other hand, by definition is incombustible and must be removed from the DPF through some type of cleaning process.
- Soot particles form in the engine’s combustion chamber as the result of incomplete combustion. The particles glow and agglomerate in the exhaust system before reaching the DPF, where the particles are captured in the filter and oxidized during the regeneration process. Ash, which is the incombustible material left behind following the regeneration process builds up over long periods of time. In conventional diesel engines, only a small percentage of the soot is composed of ash, typically less than 5%
Why is this important for DPF ash cleaning?
Ash and soot have a number of fundamental differences, both in terms of their particle size and composition, which affect the manner in which they may be removed from the DPF. Cleaning processes that involve heating the DPF, so-called “baking” only remove the combustible portion or soot, and do not remove the ash. Since the ash is incombustible, completely different cleaning processes are required to remove the ash.