Rough Idle, Hesitation On Light Throttle 115bhp 1.9pd

[Phil her up]

Firstly, many thanks to this forum and those who take the time to post on it.

 

I wanted to share my recent experience with others so here goes...

 

I drive a Seat Alhambra 2002 1.9 TD PD 115bhp. I love the car but have had to carry out many maintenance tasks in the last few years - its now done about 125000 miles.

 

For a number of months I had been occasionally experiencing a very slight hesitation on light throttle only - at high or low speeds. I decided to let it develop and develop it did! It became far more frequent - maybe three or four times on a 10 mile journey and I noticed that idling was getting lumpy. At this point I spent a lot of time searching and reading posts on here. It seemed I should be either checking the egr valve or the injector wiring. I decided to look at the egr valve first because I personally think it is fairly common for diesels to clog their egr valves after around 100000 miles.

 

Ok, it is quite an awkward job to remove the egr valve and much has been written on here about it but being fore warned was half the battle. The valve was indeed fairly clogged with crud and now it has been cleaned the problems have gone away. I may consider taking the egr off again and removing the inlet manifold to decoke that as well as I could see it is well clogged. Any advice on getting it off and how to effectively clean it would be much appreciated ;)

 

I did remove the heat shield at on the bulkhead to check for vacuum pipes behind the shield whilst I had the valve off as leaking vacuum pipes could have been the problem and I didn't know until I put the egr back if it would cure the faults or not. The heat shield is certainly easier to get at with the egr out of the way.

 

I hope this post will help others in the future.

 

I am now going to repost with some questions about other stuff that I can't find on searching :)

 

Cheers

 

Phil