Thread: Glow Plugs In A TDV6

A couple of times over the past month I have jumped into my car and just hit the starter - forgetting about glow plug time and the engine just fired and ran fine on the first turn of the key - no warmup at all. Has been -2, -3. The only indication the combustion chamber was cold was a little more black smoke.

So at the temps we are talking about I don't think the glow plugs do a lot anyway. I need to make sure the light goes out though as it is of course good practice.

So your glow plugs may or may not be U/s but I do not think at these temps they have a big impact on the engine.

Garry

Originally Posted by garrycol

A couple of times over the past month I have jumped into my car and just hit the starter - forgetting about glow plug time
Garry

You old petrol driver!

Not really - my Freelender diesel that I have had for years is pretty much the same in cold weather. It requires a few cranks though.

I recently put up the following posting in the D3/4 section and received little responce apart from GarryCol. If contributors in this section could provide some feedback I would appreciate it.

cheers,
Terry

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I have had our D3 in for some warranty work because of very rough starting up and idle when cold, especially on the cold mornings that we get down here in Goulburn.

The first workshop I went to said after putting it on diagnostic equipment that there was issues with several injectors being blocked that is why it was slow to start and didn't run on all six cylinders and ran roughly for a short period of time.
The car yard I brought it from then wanted me to take it to their preferred workshop for the work to be done which I did.

So far they have found no major issues with the injectors even though they use the same diagnostic equipment, but have found several glow plugs to be stuffed (badly carboned up) and are going through the exercise of changing them which is proving to be no easy task as several have broken while being taken out.

My question is has anyone else had a similar issue or had to have their glow plugs replaced? I can not remember reading this as a problem with TDV6's previously.

This D3 has now done 98k so it isn't a very high a mileage vehicle so I'm wondering why several of the glow plugs have failed on my particular D3 when you don't hear it happening on others. Namely could there be a bigger issue that has caused the glow plugs to fail?

Any feedback will be appreciated.


cheers,
Terry

Threads merged into Technical.

Hi Terry, our D2 runs rough at startup in cold weather, Peter has found that all 4 glow plugs were not working, once it's up and running it runs fine.

Could be that the alpine diesel isn't working as well as it should, maybe add a bit of Kero(500ml) to your fill up to see.

Baz.

Originally Posted by TerryO

So far they have found no major issues with the injectors but have found several glow plugs to be stuffed (carboned up) and are going through the exercise of changing them which is proving to be no easy task as several have broken while being taken out.

Terry - did they actually test the glow plugs before trying to pull them out. Also if the amount of carbon on them was a concern - surely the same levels of carbon would also exist in the engine. Surely high level of carbon indicates at you kms is a sign of combustion issues even when hot.

But then again - maybe a high rev run is all that is needed to get rid of it all.

From what you have posted i cannot make the link from carboned up stuffed up glow plugs. I do not know about the TDV6 but the glow plugs on my Freelander are just a stainless steel probe with the heating element inside - my plugs have done 270,000km and my engine is a hell of a lot dirtier than the TDv6 so if carbon was an issue for the glow plugs my Freelander would be having problems.

So - are your injectors firing correctly (I know you have been told they are OK).

Sorry no help with the actual issue but something to ponder and may prompt a response more knowledgeable than I.

Garry

That is what I was wondering Garry, being what has caused a number of the glow coils to carbon up in the first place.

I don't actually believe the workshop looking at the D3 now is dodgy but it does seam strange that two workshops with exactly the same diagnostic equipment can get different readings about the injectors.


cheers,
Terry