Injecting some Perspective into Your Fuel System Maintenance

While each and every system in your car is important and deserves proper regular maintenance, it’s pretty clear you won’t be getting to that next doctor’s appointment unless your FUEL SYSTEM is really on the up and up! Today we focus on your vehicle’s FUEL INJECTORS.

In a nutshell, the cylinder head of your fuel injector sprays a controlled amount of fuel directly onto the intake valve, whose high heat helps vaporize the fuel (fuel must be in vapor form to burn completely). That spray needs to contain the finest/smallest size droplets possible to facilitate vaporization. Through the normal operation of your vehicle, carbon deposits settle onto the fuel injectors, which can result in a decrease in both the amount and the vaporization of the fuel. In addition, metal and dirt debris in the fuel system can, with time, overwhelm the system’s filters, perforating them and passing through to become lodged in the injectors.

As carbon deposits and/or metal and debris accumulate on the fuel injectors, you can find yourself facing:

• Decreased fuel economy.
• Decreased engine performance.
• Increased emissions.

Signs of Clogged Injectors

While not definitive, the following signs can indicate a problem with your fuel injectors:

• A rough, unsteady idle, in which gentle application of the throttle may smooth this out.
• Sluggish acceleration and also surging under full throttle. The engine may even stall in severe cases.
• Misfiring under hard acceleration. Actually, the presence of such misfiring can help differentiate clogged fuel injectors from clogged fuel filters as the cause of symptoms. Injectors generally clog in non-uniform fashion, which, under hard acceleration, causes misfiring of one or more cylinders.
• Take a look yourself. Visual inspection of the fuel injectors may reveal deposits/clogging.

Whether your vehicle is experiencing any the above ‘symptom/s’ – or it’s simply time to have your fuel injectors inspected and cleaned (check with your mechanic or vehicle manufacturer, but many cars are recommended every 15,000 miles, and some can go longer intervals) – you have two choices for fuel injector care…and, really, it comes down to only one choice.

• Quick, Easy…and COMPLETELY Inadvisable. Like most services of any kind (whether car related or not!), you don’t have to look hard to find a fast, easy solution-in-a-bottle when it comes to fuel injector cleaning. Caution…Careful…Stop!! You most certainly want to avoid these cleaners, and the reason is simple: As soon as you dump a bottle of cleaner into your fuel tank, you lose control of the cleaning situation, because the effectiveness of the cleaner depends greatly on the degree its concentration within the fuel in your tank. The simple actions of driving your car (using up fuel), and, conversely, adding more fuel to the tank, alter the concentration and therefore the ‘dose’ of cleaner that reaches the fuel injector itself. This makes for uneven cleaning and a potentially frustrated car owner! Not to mention the fact that cleaner added to the fuel tank can remove fuel deposits within the tank itself, only to have these deposits cause damage when they reach the fuel injectors.

  Instead, always have your fuel injector inspected and cleaned cleaning by a certified mechanic.

• A Clean, Mean, Mileage Boosting Injector (Machine). Only a mechanic can perform a flow test on your injectors and determine if a standard cleaning can get you back on track, or if a more significant problem exists. A mechanic can clean your fuel injector the proper way, which involves disabling the car’s fuel pump and using the pump on the cleaning tool to run the car with a tightly controlled fuel/cleaner mixture. Using this system also permits testing of the fuel pump pressure and performing a leak down check on the fuel system.