Diesel car UNLEADED FUEL

suzy_g

I stupidly put 30 quids worth of unleaded in my diesel car:eek: I drove 10 miles home, then remembered this morning have I damaged my car??

keystone

Its better than putting diesel in a petrol car but your looking at an approx £300 bill to have the whole system cleaned out provided no damage has occured. Do not drive it again until you have consulted your garage.

Cheers

suzy_g

Oh no £300

lillytoad

i did this once garage told me to keep filling up at every opportunity and eventually it will dilute it back to complete diesel but i think it will depend on the size of your fuel tank as how long it will take

jase1

What car is it?

On some newer diesel engines this is a seriously bad idea.

gilbert_and_sullivan

Hmm, that's about 5 gallons, which is too much to dilute with further DERV top up IMO.

Did your car run OK on the way home, cos 5 galls of petrol should have caused it to run rather badly unless you already had roughly that amount of Derv in the tank, in other words are you absolutely sure you put petrol in.

Assuming you did misfuel, you'll need to get someone to come to you and drain the fuel tank, preferably by syphoning, and to blow through the fuel lines too, probably a local small indy garage would be best, hopefully £100 plus filter plus fresh fuel will cover it, much depends where you live.

Have them put a new fuel filter on before priming and restarting the engine, and for good measure grab yourself a bottle of Millers or Forte Diesel fuel additive, and sling a good dose in the tank.

The fuel that's syphoned out, i'd keep it and gradually use it a gallon or so at a time in a petrol car..the mechanic that does the job for you will likely do this anyway.

Enterprise_1701C

On my OH's Citroen Berlingo van he has done this twice. What we did was syphon out what we could from the tank and then pump the rest out (there is a pump on the engine in this van) until it cleared. Then he filled it with diesel and pumped that until it was coming through. It caughed a bit for a while but that was all.

As another poster says, some diesel engines would not be able to take this at all, we have a friend who's engine pressurises the diesel to 20 bar, wherein the petrol would explode!

suzy_g

I have a Peugeot 407 sw I know I put in unleaded last night after work, it drove really well. it was this morning when i tryed to start it it was hard to start then it started making a funny noise, this was when the penny dropped.

KierNet

I've done this as well, if its a little bit you can get away with just topping it up. How big is your tank? If its a big tank (70/80 litres), just top it up with diesel and it should be fine. Smaller might be a problem.

See it all the time at work lol.

gingerdad

keystone wrote: »

Its better than putting diesel in a petrol car but your looking at an approx £300 bill to have the whole system cleaned out provided no damage has occured. Do not drive it again until you have consulted your garage.

Cheers

one of my van drivers did this a couple of weeks ago. he filled it with unleaded drove 50 miles - it cost £125.00 to sort out (2008 Renault Traffic 2.0D 115bhp) and its fine now

suzy_g

I rang up the aa they put me in touch with someone who will do it tomorrow morning for £185