'contaminated' fuel

[kalniel]

I'm with Rave, I don't understand how it can actually cain the lambda sensor? I think the main stealers are just having a laugh... Easy money off a punter that doesn't know any different...

The theory is that the silica contaminate is forming silicon dioxide on the sensor. But that should just require cleaning, not replacing.

[SHare]

If there is a problem with the fuel mix or engine it upsets the lambda sensor on alot of cars, most can be fixed but I think we'll find alot of the cars are renaults. My old megane ate through 2 lambda sensors and 2 new cats in 6 months because of an ECU fault and the dealers failure to diagnose it correctly.

You may have noticed I am not mechanically gifted, its basically what I was told by an independent garage I'd taken it to to double check what Renault told me. He reckoned it was the french marques poor design that caused them to fail while other brands could be reset or cleaned up.

[99Flake]

In a petrol car the injectors are in the intake manifold, well away from the combustion chamber, so they shouldn't 'soot up' unless the petrol contains large quantities of actual soot- which I doubt.

I'm at a loss to explain all this- if you feed E85 to a normal petrol car it'll run very lean, which could easily damage it, but I fail to see how that would damage a lambda sensor unless they're simply burning out from excessively hot exhaust gas temperatures. If the lambda sensor is working properly it should just richen out the mixture anyway.

For the last six months I've filled my bike up with all sorts of different fuels, including Shell, BP, and Tesco, and have never noticed the slightest bit of difference. Albeit that my bike isn't that highly tuned by bike standards, it still puts out nigh on 100bhp/litre, so you would have thought it'd be more sensitive to crappy fuel than most car engines.

The only reason I said this is because all and I mean all of the technicians at my local (where I worked) BMW garage said this. We had an M3 that came in with a 'loss of power' complaint. We plugged it in did all the normal checks and could not find a problem with the car. It wasn't until the glove box was opened to get to some other parts of the car that we found all the Sainsbury's fuel reciepts. The guy was using super (98 ron) unleaded so he was putting the correct type of fuel in, just not the best quality. When the tech took the injectors out they were found to be sooty and blocked. Replaced them and the car ran fine.

This wasn't the only time either, after we had found that out we discovered other cars like 330/540's M5's etc that suffered the same fate. I even had it on a 1.1 Citroen AX years back.

The simple fact is that the supermarket petrol is the lower quality stuff the big petrolium companies don't want. It is taken off lower down and is therefore full of rubbish in comparsion.