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DPF Cleaning, Diagnostics and Forced Regeneration in Lutterworth
Our workshop is on Rugby Road, so Lutterworth is the one town where a blocked filter can be dealt with either way round. We come to the vehicle, or you drop it in. What does not change is that the job starts with finding out what filled the filter, not with clearing the light.
Two kinds of Lutterworth diesel, failing for opposite reasons
Junction 20 sits on the edge of the town and the A4303 runs straight down to it, so a lot of vehicles here are at motorway speed within a couple of minutes of leaving the drive. Plenty of others never do that at all. They move between the town centre, the A426 and the surrounding villages, three or four miles at a time, and the exhaust never really gets hot. Those two patterns both block filters, and they do it for completely different reasons.
The short trip vehicle is the ordinary case. Soot accumulates faster than the vehicle is ever given the chance to burn it off. A regeneration starts on the way home from the shops and is cut short when the ignition goes off, the loading creeps up over months, and eventually something complains on the dashboard. Nothing has actually broken. The vehicle is being asked to do a job its emissions equipment was never calibrated around.
The motorway case is the more interesting one. If you are on the M1 most days and the filter is still loading, your driving is not the cause, so either something upstream is producing more soot than it should or the ECU is never being told to start a regeneration. That is a diagnostic question, and cleaning the filter without answering it only moves the date of the next warning light.
We start with live data, not with the filter
Fault codes tell you which circuit is unhappy. Live data tells you the story. We look at the pressure differential across the filter, the soot and ash figures the ECU is calculating, exhaust temperatures either side of it, and the regeneration history: how many cycles the vehicle has attempted, how many it managed to finish, and how recently. A car that has tried forty and completed three is telling you something very specific about itself.
From there we work back up the exhaust. An injector that is no longer atomising cleanly, a turbo passing oil, an EGR valve stuck part open, a split pressure pipe, a temperature sensor reading low enough that the ECU never commits to a regeneration. All of those fill a filter or stop it clearing, and none of them are cured by cleaning. Finding the cause is the difference between one visit and the same visit again in two months.
Where cleaning and a forced regeneration genuinely are the answer, we do that and then prove it with the data afterwards: pressure back down, calculated loading back down, and a filter the vehicle can look after itself from there. If the numbers say the ash loading is past saving, you get told that instead of being sold a clean that will not hold.
DPF light on somewhere in Lutterworth?Ring and describe it. You can leave it on the drive for us or bring it down to Rugby Road, whichever is less trouble.
Call 07773 694570What we will not do to your emissions system
We do not take diesel particulate filters off vehicles, and we do not write software that tells an ECU a filter is present when it is not. It fails the MOT, it makes the vehicle unlawful to use on the road afterwards, and it hands your insurer an argument you would rather not have. That answer does not change depending on the vehicle, the mileage, or who is asking.
EGR and AdBlue get the same treatment. We diagnose them, repair them and get them behaving the way they were designed to. We do not blank them, delete them or emulate them. AdBlue faults in particular are very often one component, a heater, a pump, a crystallised injector or a quality sensor, rather than the whole system, and that is worth establishing before anybody starts buying parts. If a delete is what you came for, say so on the phone and we can both save the afternoon.
Rugby Road, or your driveway in Lutterworth
The diagnostics, the live data and the forced regeneration are all perfectly doable at the vehicle, so if the easiest thing is to leave it on the drive and let us come to it, that works. Mobile visits in Lutterworth are the same equipment and the same procedure as anything done indoors. A filter does not care what the car is parked next to while the work happens.
What being minutes away does change is the awkward middle of this job. If the filter has to come off for a proper clean, or the diagnosis turns into an injector, the vehicle is already local to where the tools are rather than sitting twenty miles up a motorway. And if the honest conclusion is that the way the car is used is the cause, you can bring it back after a few hundred miles and we can look at whether the numbers have actually moved.
Ring first whichever route you take, and describe what it is doing. Steady light or flashing, limp mode or not, what the mileage is and what the vehicle does in an ordinary week. Whether the light has been on for a day or for three months is worth mentioning as well, because it changes how likely the filter still is to be cleanable. Get in touch and that conversation on its own usually narrows things down a long way before anything is plugged in.
DPF Cleaning and Diagnostics in Lutterworth: your questions answered
Can I just bring the car to the workshop?
Yes. We are at 3 Rugby Road in Lutterworth, LE17 4BW, and being able to drop the vehicle in is the advantage of living here. Ring before you set off so we know you are coming and roughly what we are looking at, because the symptoms usually tell us what equipment to have ready. If it suits you better to leave it at home and have us come out instead, that is equally fine.
The light came on coming back from junction 20. What now?
If it is a steady light and the car is otherwise driving normally, the filter is loading and asking for a proper run. A sustained stretch at speed in a lower gear than you would usually hold gives the exhaust the best chance of getting hot enough. If it is flashing, or the car has dropped into limp mode, or other warnings have joined it, stop driving it. That is how a cleanable filter turns into a replacement.
Do you remove DPFs?
No. Taking the filter out fails the MOT and makes the vehicle unlawful to use on the road, and we will not write software that pretends a missing filter is still fitted either. We diagnose, clean and force regenerate instead, and we repair what caused the problem. If removal is what you are after, we are not the right people and we would rather say so straight away.
My car only does short runs round the town and the villages. Is a diesel wrong for me?
Not necessarily, but it does mean the filter needs looking after. Short cold journeys are the hardest use a DPF gets, because soot goes in and almost never gets burned off, and a regeneration that starts on the way home and is interrupted when you switch off leaves things worse than before. A deliberate longer run every so often helps a lot. If that is not realistic for you, we will talk about what is.
How do you tell whether the filter can be cleaned or needs replacing?
The live data answers it. Soot can be burned off and ash cannot, so a filter carrying a high calculated ash figure, or one where the pressure differential stays stubbornly high after a regeneration that completed properly, has reached the end of its working life. We would rather tell you that and let you decide than take money for a clean we already know will not hold.
What actually happens during a forced regeneration?
We command the ECU to run a regeneration cycle deliberately rather than waiting for the vehicle to decide it is ready. The engine deliberately raises exhaust temperature and holds it there long enough to burn the trapped soot away. It takes a while and it is not gentle on the vehicle, which is why it is only appropriate when the loading is within a range the filter can safely clear.
Can the diagnostics be done outside my house?
Yes, most of it. Reading live data, checking pressure and temperatures, going through the regeneration history and running a forced regeneration all happen at the vehicle. If what we find means the filter has to come off, or the fault turns out to be an injector, we will tell you before we start rather than halfway through, and then it is a short run down to the workshop.
Will remapping the car sort a filter that keeps blocking?
No, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling rather than diagnosing. A map does not unblock anything. What a properly written map can do, once the real cause has been dealt with, is stop the engine making more soot than it needs to in the first place. That is a sensible second step, never the fix.
What goes wrong with AdBlue systems?
Usually one part rather than all of it. Crystallisation in the injector or the lines, a pump that has given up, a tank heater that fails as soon as the weather turns, or a quality or level sensor reading wrongly and putting the vehicle into a countdown. They are worth diagnosing properly, because replacing components hopefully gets expensive quickly. What we will not do is blank or emulate the system.
How much is DPF work?
It depends entirely on what the diagnosis finds, which is why there is no flat figure on this page. A straightforward diagnosis followed by a forced regeneration is a very different job from a filter that has to come off and be cleaned properly, or an injector fault that needs sorting first. Ring, describe the symptoms, and you will get a realistic idea before anything is booked.
If the light comes back, can you look at it again?
That is one of the genuine advantages of being local. If the light returns we can look at the data again and compare it against what we recorded the first time, which usually tells us quickly whether the original cause was missed or whether something new has appeared. Getting a vehicle back in front of us is a five minute drive rather than a rearranged day.
What do you need me to have ready?
A vehicle that starts and runs, a battery in reasonable health, and somewhere it can sit for the duration. A forced regeneration in particular needs the engine running for a sustained period, so it wants to be somewhere sensible rather than on a narrow street. If you know the battery is tired, mention it when you ring, because that is the one thing most likely to stop a job part way.
Find out what filled the filter
Diagnostics, cleaning and forced regeneration across Lutterworth, with the workshop on the doorstep if it turns into a bigger job.
Call 07773 694570