DPF light flashing :-(

[Lemon]

Hello

wonder if anyone can help. I recently bought a 2010 Outback Diesel.

now the DPF light has come on a few times and I have cleared it following the procedure in the hand book, but today whilst driving back from Perth to my place in Braemar, the light is now flashing. I was driving fairly quickly on this road, so engine was up to temp.

Does this sound like the DPF needs clearing? any ideas how to rectify this? Is it a dealer only DPF regeneration? Nearest dealer  think is 1 hour 15 away :-(

can a local garage handle these regenerations?

any help here would be great

thanks

Lee

[stuartie]

Hiya lee unfortunetly i dont have any experience with the outback diesel but do work on diesel engines and by the sound of it it looks as if the dpf could be starting to get blocked which your local garage should be able to re-gen if the have decent software to read the ecu, also they will have to change the engine oil and filter afterwards as when the re-gen is being carried out the ecu chucks tons of fuel in to clean out the dpf which gets into the oil and thins it out and basically fills the sump so its really important to get that changed straight after the dpf has been cleared, hope this helps buddy ☺

[Lemon]

Thanks for the advice Stuartie

im off to my local Subaru dealer Thursday.

[W444AJD]

I would put a bottle of DPF cleaner in the fuel tank ASAP and give it a decent run, something like Forte.  That helped with my last car which had a DPF.

[donnylad]

DPF's are a total pain in the !Removed!, get it gutted IMO, I did this on my bmw and never had 1 problem!

[DPFCleaned]

Hi ,

There is a lot of talk on the forums about getting the car to Regen in order to get rid of the DPF lights / message showing on the dashboard.

In order to fix this problem effectively and as economically as possible ,  it is important to understand exactly what has happened  with your DPF .

The DPF will regenerate when the right conditions are met based on a number of factors and this happens a lot more often than you might think , 
The DPF lights or message will start to appear when the vehicle is struggling to perform a effective regeneration ,

Taking it to a garage and asking them to get the car to do a forced regeneration is pointless and a waste of money as the car is already trying to do the same thing and failing (hence the error message / lights).

The only time you can overcome this problem is when the DPF is not being asked to perform a regeneration due to a faulty sensor (exhaust temperature sensor , differential pressure sensor , Vaporiser ) or some other component directly related to the DPF .Then you can replace the faulty component and ask the car to do a forced regeneration. However you need to bear in mind that most of the time a Differential pressure sensor fault is caused by the blocked DPF as the sensor pipes are also clogged.

During the the normal operation of a DPF it will trap soot which it will vaporise during regeneration , as a byproduct of the soot being vaporised a small amount of residue is created which is ash , this ash has nowhere to go and starts to collect in the DPF , as time goes on the amount of
ash in the DPF increases and the space available for the soot to collect before being vaporised decreases , this results in the car trying to perform regenerations with increasing frequency and results in the oil level going up due to the excess fuel making its way back into the sump.

The only real solution is to get the DPF cleaned out or gutted  , Given that gutting the DPF is illegal / harmful to the environment and wont help you get an MOT then it really is an inappropriate choice unless you dont really care about anyone except yourself.
There are a lot of choices available when it come to cleaning the DPF and range from cheap chinese ultrasonic machines to Professional level Italian Flash machines.

The Flash machine is the best way forward as it is a straight forward solution which makes sense and with flushing at 3-10 Bar it is guaranteed to unblock even the most stubborn blockage , you can watch the flash machine in a Video on youtube , or you can go to our website for more information.

Good luck and let us know how you get on.