Recently Ed Cockill from Uckfield Motor Services spoke about best practice when it comes to troubleshooting EGR valve problems and the benefits of choosing a reputable supplier, such as Elta.
When it comes to a faulty EGR valve, most of the time there’s an engine management light on there, running issues, things like that. You’ve got to get as much information as you can from the customer about what is going on. We send out a questionnaire beforehand and they have to fill that out before the car even comes in.
Next thing is normally you plug it in, pull the full codes off of it. Most of the time, like with VAG ones, we see a lot of the P0401 codes, and because we change lots of those in the 1.6 diesels, we kind of know what that is. But sometimes the codes are a bit ambiguous and they don’t give you the full story. So we’d have to go in a little bit further than that. And the way we do that is by training and researching and looking into things.
It’s really important that you get a good diagnosis on the EGR valve. There are lots of other items on the vehicle that can cause said codes to come on and flag an EGR valve. And we’ve all been there where you’ve bolt an EGR valve onto it and it doesn’t sort the problem, or the problem reoccurs a month down the line, two months down the line and then you’ve got an unhappy customer. Some of these bills to replace EGR valves are quite expensive, so it’s worth doing a good diagnosis.
Holistic approach
Next thing I would do is obviously check the state of the rest of the engine. You might have multiple fault codes on there like injectors, air mass, stuff like that. And that could also cause problems for the EGR valve. Also, check the service history, because if the car hasn’t been serviced, it’s probably going to be clogged up with carbon, which can also block up an EGR valve eventually. So make sure everything’s good on the engine, on the engine management, before you bolt the EGR valve on it. And that’s why a diagnosis is vitally important. Because if not, you’d be taking the EGR valve back and sending it back, even though that’s probably not the problem in the first place.
Elta have over 365 different EGR valves which apply to about 10,000 different vehicles. So they’ve got a full range of EGR valves and lots of other parts as well. So you should be able to cover most bases with Elta. It’s a really good thing also to check that the fitting of them is bang on. It’s really important that you use new gaskets while doing them, using the correct torque settings when you’re doing them up, because if you don’t do these pipes up correctly or line them up correctly, they’ll leak air, which may not show up straight away. It may take a full duty cycle of 100, 200 miles on the vehicle to show up. And then once again, you’re going to have a very angry customer when their engine management light comes on in a week or two.
