cleaning EGR system without removing intake

i'm no expert, but if it says professional on the label, it must work.

 

I have 0 expertise or knowledge about this, so it would be great to know if this stuff works, but I worry it will foster the types of spirited and highly polarized discussions you get around other products like fuel additives. Also, if you were spraying it in the intake wouldn't you also need to do some techstream trickery to make sure it actually goes through the EGR system?

 

Only one way to sufficiently test this hypothesis:
1. Take apart the entire EGR circuit (incl. the intake manifold) as THOUGH you were going to clean it.
2. Do NOT clean it, but reassemble it (noting any cloggage, of course).
3. Do the thing with the stuff...
4. THEN take apart the EGR circuit (again, inspecting it carefully for changes for the better...).
5. THEN properly clean all of it (as it will, IMO, certainly need it).
6. Reassemble the EGR circuit.
7. Congratulate yourself for going on a Fool's Errand™

 

I looked up the directions for the stuff. It is made for cleaning the particulate filters on diesels, and the directions are to remove the particulate filter. fill it with the stuff, and let it soak.

But they do suggest that it does something when used as a "Service Shot" through the intake. Ed's point is well taken that a Prius is probably not going to send much or any of it through the EGR, under idling conditions like what's shown in the video.

I've been wondering lately how clogged the exhaust heat exchanger under the car ever gets? Not as much gets posted about that. I wonder if taking that pipe off and soaking it in something like this might be of some benefit.

 

Maybe you could put a potato in the exhaust pipe (to act as a plug) and then remove your EGR pipe and add 50 liters of the stuff until the entire EGR and exhaust system was full of liquid cleaner, then remove the potato, let drain, put EGR pipe back on and fire the car back up?

Obviously I am joking here, because it sounds appealing that you could soak the entire EGR and exhaust system by filling it and draining somehow, but I am sure there are 100 reasons why this wouldn't work.

 

At LEAST 200...

 

Turbo diesels certainly have their problems with gunk build up but mechanics almost always have to disassemble and clean those systems as well, regardless of marketing claims. With that said, there are engines of a given type with better designs than others. In the case of a Prius, either the gen2 with no egr or the gen4 with a vastly improved egr largely eliminates the issue. Combine oil burning on the early gen3 engines and you have quite a design fail.

The sprays are unlikely to help a design issue. Plus the basic layout of a non turbo, port injected Prius is quite different than a turbo diesel, offering no direct access to the egr cooler from the air intake. Generally the only thing that gets removed with a spray are your dollars.

Typical Turbo Diesel EGR and EGR Cooler

 

Thinking (as an example) of the effort required to clear the EGR cooler when it's out of the car, multiple hour soaks in Oxi-Clean, liberal oven cleaner sprays, pressure washer, wires on drills: there is no way this proposal is going to work, lol.

 

Maybe there is something super effective about the DPF cleaner. Not that it would work miracles sprayed haphazardly into the intake, but who knows, maybe soaking in it works better than Oxi-Clean?

Thinking about it and the exhaust heat exchanger downstairs ... I don't think there even is any access to that for wires on drills, etc. Two catalytic converters in the way ahead of it, a longish pipe section behind it. Soaking in some kind of liquid might be the only option (short of cutting it up, cleaning, welding back together).

 

All very reasonable conjecture, but how to ascertain that it works on the Prius? Please review post #4 (wherein you'd have to repeat that process n times, where n is the number that would satisfactorily determine the efficacy of the process.

Perhaps better to just clean the deuced thing every 50,000 miles, eh?

 

The problem is the Prius egr cooler is between the exhaust pipe and the egr valve meaning the magic aerosol has to make it through the intake, combustion chamber, exhaust valve and then to the intake of the egr cooler. After going through combustion, any cleaner is just another part of the problem. The hardened gasoline carbon deposits at the entrance to the Prius egr cooler are significantly more dense than the fluidized sludge created in a turbo diesel. The Prius cooler is exposed 100% of the time to the exhaust flow while the diesel egr cooler is downstream of the egr valve and does not see exhaust gas when the egr is closed. So the gunk in a turbo diesel is more like axle grease where the carbon in a Prius egr cooler is closer to baked on epoxy than a grease.

Some correlate the injector and valve cleaning ability of gasoline additives to these unrelated spray cleaners. In the case of gasoline additives, those chemicals are applied continuously prior to combustion through the injectors and intake valves (port injected engine valves). They are effective and are included in any retail gasoline.

But the biggest issue with gen3 Prius is the engineering. The gen4 design moves the egr cooler downstream of the cat. The cat cleans up the exhaust flow first. The gen4 egr cooler is bigger and less likely to clog. The oil burning issues of gen3 have been resolved in gen4. Which means far less hydrocarbons in the exhaust stream. Better engineering means better results.

 

It's important not to give the impression that the Gen 3 to Gen 4 change from uncatalyzed to catalyzed EGR was some kind of bug fix slapped on for the discovery that EGR passages could foul.

There was active engineering research around that period into which of the two forms of EGR was better for managing the combustion process in the cylinders. There were some early results that weren't clearly showing that catalyzed EGR was a better way to run an engine (such as those reported here), and later work that seems to have worked out better ways of optimizing for the catalyzed EGR source and showed improvements in performance (as mentioned, e.g., here).

One of the differences is that pre-catalyst EGR still contains some stuff that'll burn (NOx, CO, HC). The post-catalyst stuff doesn't. So while both slow down the combustion process in the cylinder, the catalyzed EGR slows it more, among other chemistry-related effects, so calibrations in the ECM have to be tweaked for that. Passing through the catalyst reduces the available pressure, so all the EGR plumbing is upsized for the simple reason that it has to be to carry the necessary flow of lower-pressure gas.

There's a whole lot that goes into designing and building these things.

 

I had thought about doing the potato plug and soaking the entire Exhaust from the EGR cooler down in ammonia. It would definitely remove the soot. But then it could corrode the aluminum parts. Not sure what it would do to the catalytic converter.

 

It's unlikely to help.Post by Mendel Leisk above sums it up. I've done my 2013 twice, and the EGR cooler internal cleaning is some seriously baked on carbon. I obtained an extra EGR and experimented with cleaning a couple different ways on the 2 I had available and determined Pressure washer followed by purple power overnight soak of EGR seemed to be best practice. 99% effective and less effort and cost then using several cans of brake clean or oxy or potentially damaging the internal fins with welding rods or wires. The whole procedure as done in the excellent NutzAboutBolts videos is the way to proceed.