PROCEDURE

To fulfill the requirements of your vehicle and ther way it is setup to self-clean you must drive it as if in Cruise Control mode or imagine you have Criuse Control if you don’t have it fitted. You should stay between 55mph and 65mph at around 2500 revs ideally but the critical part is between 55mph and 65mph and stay in this mode for 15 minutes.

It is important that you do not break out of this cycle – the actual ideal speed is 60mph at 2500 revs for 15 minutes.

If you can achieve this then the ECU (vehicle’s computer) will instruct self-cleaning mode to commence. This cleaning cycle will last for approximately 10 minutes providing you do not break out of the cycle of 55-65 mph.

You cannot brake and you cannot accelerate or the 15 minute or 10 minute cleaning cycle will have to begin again so it is best to do this on a long and quite road when very little other traffic is present.

If you do not do this then you will not burn off the excess soot inside the DPF, it will become clogged and the ECU will restrict how you drive the vehicle until the problem is corrected usually by removing the DPF and having it professionally cleaned.

This process of self cleaning is called ‘passive regeneration’, this is different to a forced regeneration which a garage might want to do to your vehicle. whereby they will plug your vehicle into a diagnostic machine and let the machine control the rtevs on your vehicle to try to make it self-clean.

THIS IS NOT A GOOD IDEA – DO NOT CLEAN YOUR DPF IN THIS MANNER – think of you r DPF as a cat with nine lives – for every forced regeneration you do you will take away one of its lives and then you would have only one option – complete brand new replacement of the DPF – VERY EXPENSIVE.

So going back to the procedure of passive regeneration, if you live in Hull for example then you would drive up to the last dual carriageway exit at South Cave, turn around and come back into Hull and if driven correctly, you would have completed two self-cleaning cycles and the DPF should be clean.

If this does not work and you are sure you have followed the procedure then you will need to bring your vehicle into us for a check as the DPF will need either removing and cleaning or the fault will be caused by something else.

There is much more information regarding the DPF’s this is only maybe 20% of the overall causes and effects so please contact us for any further help and advice.

After talking to customers and them viewing this procedure, it is clear that many of them were not reading this and understanding it, it is critical that you DO understand this procedure otherwise, problems will probably re-surface in the future.

What many are not understanding is that you need to take the vehicle on a special drive but here is the mis-understood part.

It is better that you do this on a night or very early morning when there are hardly any trucks on the road as these vehicles can severly hamper this procedure and here is why…

So imagine you are going 60mph on a motorway or dual carriageway and a truck or other vehicle pulls out in front of you and you need to brake or maybe there is something else travelling at 59mph and you need to accelerate to get past it, well what you have done there by touching the brake or accelerator is … you have broken the cycle of the self-cleaning process and you have to now do another 20-25 minutes of driving without braking or accelerating until successful.

One important fact here is that if you have an engine light on then the DPF self-cleaning process activated by your vehicle’s computer system will now be disabled and it will not clean at all until the fault is fixed.

So don’t bother doing this procedure if you have an engine light on otherwise you are just wasting your time and fuel.

Ideally you would bring the vehicle into us for a diagnosis and live data check and that way we can see what all the sensors on your engine are doing and then usually pinpoint the faulty component because maybe 80% of the time, the DPF itself is not actually the problem.