Let's start with the vehicle which is a 70 plate Citroen Relay panel van.
It's relatively high mileage (160k) and spent its working life going from London to Southampton daily moving car parts.
It's done a couple of 'test' trips down to northern France and never missed a beat and I've just taken it to northern Italy.
Set off on Monday and all was good. Lots of cruise control, but didn't do motorways so various bits of 'actual driving' through towns and villages in between.
Parked up at an Aire for a kip and then set off again about 3am. It was probably just around freezing temp.
Started up, headed straight up the slip road, gave it a foot full of acceleration and.... orange CEL light came on, revs (or possibly speed) got limited and all was not well. Cruise control wouldn't engage at all.
Thankfully there wasn't much in the way of traffic and I managed to take the next exit and found parking outside a boulangerie.
They provided a delightful breakfast and coffee as well as directions to a local garage who in turn did me a 'cash price' for sticking a diagnostic tool on the van.
The other thing to know is that I've had a message about needing to change the oil since I did a 'reset' of the battery while trying to resolve the issue that my key fob wasn't working anymore (that turned out to be the spare fob battery that I'd put in having been so old that it was flat!). The oil has been in a year and is probably due for replacement soon, but I've also been told that there's a recall on my van as it warns you about the oil before it's actually due. I was going to be cheeky and squeeze this trip out of it and then get Citroen to pay me for the oil change! It's not done many miles so I know the oil is still good.
Anyway - back to the results of the diagnostics...
The chap said that there wasn't anything serious, there were a couple of things 'out of balance' one of which was (as I understood it) one of the sensors related to the DPF. He cleared the codes and the CEL light went out.
This is the bit that I'd like the opinion on really. He went on to tell me that the oil warning (which is still present) would prevent the DPF from doing a regen and that this could lead to the oil and diesel mixing and being burned together in the engine killing diesel runaway situation. He said the oil absolutely needed to be changed to prevent this and that I shouldn't carry on driving.
Turns out they didn't have any workshop time available so they sent me over to Norauto who essentially said this was utter nonsense and that they would change the oil for me if I really wanted but that it had nothing whatsoever to do with the orange CEL. They said that it was possible that one of the sensors was a bit gunked up and so it might have been giving inaccurate readings which could have triggered the CEL but that they weren't overly fussed about it.
So I took the chance and did the remaining 6h drive to Italy without any major incident. The cruise control did drop out a couple of times but always came back and the CEL hasn't come back.
I'm here for a bit so have the time to get a mechanic to look at it if needed, but all seems to be OK now so I don't really know if it's worth it?
I don't even know what I'd be asking them to check.
Could it be a gunked up sensor that just got a whole lot of acceleration on a cold engine tipping the reading to go into 'protect mode'?
What would you do now?
It's relatively high mileage (160k) and spent its working life going from London to Southampton daily moving car parts.
It's done a couple of 'test' trips down to northern France and never missed a beat and I've just taken it to northern Italy.
Set off on Monday and all was good. Lots of cruise control, but didn't do motorways so various bits of 'actual driving' through towns and villages in between.
Parked up at an Aire for a kip and then set off again about 3am. It was probably just around freezing temp.
Started up, headed straight up the slip road, gave it a foot full of acceleration and.... orange CEL light came on, revs (or possibly speed) got limited and all was not well. Cruise control wouldn't engage at all.
Thankfully there wasn't much in the way of traffic and I managed to take the next exit and found parking outside a boulangerie.
They provided a delightful breakfast and coffee as well as directions to a local garage who in turn did me a 'cash price' for sticking a diagnostic tool on the van.
The other thing to know is that I've had a message about needing to change the oil since I did a 'reset' of the battery while trying to resolve the issue that my key fob wasn't working anymore (that turned out to be the spare fob battery that I'd put in having been so old that it was flat!). The oil has been in a year and is probably due for replacement soon, but I've also been told that there's a recall on my van as it warns you about the oil before it's actually due. I was going to be cheeky and squeeze this trip out of it and then get Citroen to pay me for the oil change! It's not done many miles so I know the oil is still good.
Anyway - back to the results of the diagnostics...
The chap said that there wasn't anything serious, there were a couple of things 'out of balance' one of which was (as I understood it) one of the sensors related to the DPF. He cleared the codes and the CEL light went out.
This is the bit that I'd like the opinion on really. He went on to tell me that the oil warning (which is still present) would prevent the DPF from doing a regen and that this could lead to the oil and diesel mixing and being burned together in the engine killing diesel runaway situation. He said the oil absolutely needed to be changed to prevent this and that I shouldn't carry on driving.
Turns out they didn't have any workshop time available so they sent me over to Norauto who essentially said this was utter nonsense and that they would change the oil for me if I really wanted but that it had nothing whatsoever to do with the orange CEL. They said that it was possible that one of the sensors was a bit gunked up and so it might have been giving inaccurate readings which could have triggered the CEL but that they weren't overly fussed about it.
So I took the chance and did the remaining 6h drive to Italy without any major incident. The cruise control did drop out a couple of times but always came back and the CEL hasn't come back.
I'm here for a bit so have the time to get a mechanic to look at it if needed, but all seems to be OK now so I don't really know if it's worth it?
I don't even know what I'd be asking them to check.
Could it be a gunked up sensor that just got a whole lot of acceleration on a cold engine tipping the reading to go into 'protect mode'?
What would you do now?