ripley

I recently bought a 2007 LCI 530d. This is a low mileage car (less than 50k).

I had the car for a couple of weeks when I noticed a lack of power when taking off and I kept getting the DPF warning.

It seemed OK when driving - just felt exceptionally laggy especially down low.

I got an ELM327 bluetooth plug from ebay (china) and it confirmed the the coolant temperature was in the low 70's.

Then I ordered a DCAN cable + software from cable shack (also ebay).

DIS showed a back pressure of around 150 mbar at idle and up to 600 mbar at around 100km/h.

I replaced the main and egr thermostats and that got the temperature up to around 89-90 but there were five out of six glow plugs broken.

These were all replaced (checked with multimeter some were open circuit, some were 150k ohms).

No regeneration was happening at this pressure so I had to find a way to clean out the DPF - I was trying to avoid a solution that involved fooling the dpf pressure sensor.

There was a place in Sydney (I'm in Brisbane) that offered DPF cleaning but it would have cost close to $1000 once transport was considered - and they wanted to cut and weld the thing.

Doing an ebay scan for new/reco DPF's I saw an ad for DPF cleaning in Brisbane for $220. This was from a business called Brisbane Brake and Clutch Supplies at Rocklea (no affiliation). They have a full workshop but the price would not include removal/installation I'm pretty sure.

Had to be worth a go so I called them up and they said no problems - though they mostly do truck dpf's (which are huge by comparison). They use a chemical flush.

I took the dpf off the car and dropped it off. Got a call a few hours later and picked it up.

It should have been lighter but was almost a kilo heavier - this was due to the residual water in the dpf from flushing the chemicals out of it - and it had an odd smell. It's a shame as I wanted to weight the soot/carbon removed by cleaning.

Back on the car in half the time to remove.

From the first drive the car was feeling better. It started its own regen after a few kilometers and I watched the exhaust temp get to around 650C.

A couple of days later I forced a regen using DIS just to be sure.

Now the back pressure at idle is 2mbar and its around 12mbar at 100km/h on a flat road - which makes me very happy.

I will monitor the regens and back pressure to see how it goes.