Thread: Endless Td5 fuel issue

Hi All

I've been having a lot of trouble lately with the fuel system on my 99 Td5 D2. It's getting on a bit now, with 303k kms on the clock. The problem started about a year ago where it would struggle to start when cold. The engine would have to be turned over a few times, where it would fire eventually and then cough and it would finally run normally. It almost sounded like in the first few seconds it was only running on a few cylinders. When I started it again after running for a few minutes or after a short journey, the car would start fine.

So I started by replacing the fuel pump. The FPR was only a year old so did not think it was necessary to replace it as well. After the fuel pump was replaced, still no improvement. The car then started to cut out for a few seconds whilst driving, where the check engine light would come on for a few seconds and everything would be fine again. Almost as if one of the injectors is being starved of fuel. So the other day I pulled over to take a phone call, and eventually turned the car off. When I went to start it again, it stalled as I took off and refused to start again. I ran the purging sequence about 5 times, and along with excessive cranking got it going again.

So thinking that compression gasses are somehow making their way into the fuel system, I went about changing the injector washers and o-rings. I wasn't expecting them to be "blown" at all as the head was overhauled about 25k kms ago...and this was exactly the case. Went to start it this morning, and the exact same difficulty with starting...no improvement.

It seems to me that air is getting pumped/trapped in the system and it is unable to be purged. Next step is to replace the FPR as it may not seal off properly when not under pressure. But if that still does not fix the problem, I will have to start looking at the injectors themselves. I put the nanocom on and read for faults, and there are no injector related faults present.

Has anyone had these sort of ongoing issues after changing out the injector washers? Any help with this would be much appreciated as I am about to hit a brick wall.

if this usually occurs as the tank is below half[ as was the case in my situatio] the cure was a new [used ] fuel filter housing . the non return was suspect. since then no problems. a nice cheap fix