Hi,

I have a 56 plate 2.0 duratorq with 72k miles. The black smoke when I accel, particularly when towing the caravan, was getting to be a nuisance and I noticed the consumption starting to rise. I took off the recirc valve and inlet manifold and cleaned both. They were pretty badly choked and since then its fine with no smoke at all.

Not a particularly hard task albeit a very dirty one. My question is how often should I expect to do it? I last did it 7k miles ago (although that time I didn't remove the manifold)! Surely it can't be normal to do this at (almost)evry oil change? Am I doing something wrong or missing something? ( and how do get your hands clean afterwards??

what a wonderfull job it is cleaning the egr and manifold,as its only a 15 min job to whip the valve off i inspect mine yearly and clean if required,good old fairy liquid should get your hands clean.

what a wonderfull job it is cleaning the egr and manifold,as its only a 15 min job to whip the valve off i inspect mine yearly and clean if required,good old fairy liquid should get your hands clean.

I agree its only a 15 min job to take the valve off but.......

if you do a lot of miles then it must be a real pain to be doing it every 15 thousand miles or so which may be every 6 months. Are all td's the same; is there nothingyou can do to stop it building up?

If only fairy liquid worked......

if you had a euro 3 engine you could blank of the valve will no side effects,but with yours being a euro 4 if you blank the valve off the eml will light up due to lack of air flow,this wont damage the engine but with the light being on it could mask any other fauth codes.