How Worried Should You Be? Petrol in a Diesel Car in Brown Edge
Far less than you likely are, provided it hasn't been started. "Have I wrecked it?" is the first thing anyone around Brown Edge asks, and the truthful answer is usually no, because petrol resting in a diesel tank harms nothing until it is dragged through the fuel system — by ignition priming, by your starter, or by driving. Keep it like that: leave your motor off then ring Petrol in Diesel. Below, you will find what petrol actually does inside a diesel, how far it may have got, and how to stop it happening to you a second time.
Petrol in a diesel: what does it do to the engine?
On its way through a motor, diesel has two tasks. Before it ignites, it lubricates — and then it combusts. The high-pressure pump and the fuel injectors are designed to extremely fine clearances, and the diesel passing through them is what keeps those surfaces from grinding against one another.
Of these two tasks, petrol handles the first badly and the second not at all. It's runnier than diesel and removes the protection the system rests on, so a pump running on a petrol mix is a pump wearing itself. And petrol is made to resist igniting under compression, which is the opposite of what a diesel needs from its fuel. That is where the rattling comes from.
Seen together, they show what shape the issue takes. It is movement that does the damage, not contact. All a tank with petrol in it amounts to is a fuel issue. A pump that has been working on that petrol is the start of a mechanical one, and whatever a worn pump sheds travels on with the fuel to the injectors downstream.
Petrol in a diesel in Brown Edge: how serious is it? Four cases
Filled up, not once started. The best case there is. Being at a forecourt is what makes this possible: elsewhere, your car has been driven there to begin with. With that petrol kept in the tank alone, it's drained and cleaned right where it stands, and nothing more is needed.
Ignition on, or started for a second. Your system has been primed, and so petrol has left the tank and got to the filter and your lines. That's usually still an easy task — a drain, a flush, and your filter dealt with.
Some miles driven, and your pump has spent every one of them running on diluted fuel. The work is your tank, the lines, the fuel filter and clean fuel through the whole system, and how hard the vehicle was driven counts as much as how far. Short trips, such as the school run to St Anne's CofE (VC) Primary School, are one thing. A run as far as Stoke-on-Trent, under 5 miles away, is a very different task. So is any mileage on the M6, under 10 miles from Brown Edge, where the motor has been running hard the whole time.
Driven until it complained. Knocking, a lumpy idle, smoke, a throttle that has gone soft. That is your motor telling you its fuel no longer is behaving like diesel. Pull up where you are — on the verge on High Lane, at the kerb, down a side road — and don't move it again. A vehicle stopped early very seldom has lasting damage, since the fuel drain and the flush, which still go first, deal with it.
Brown Edge drivers and the petrol in a diesel myths they hear
Myth: "Fill it the rest of the way with diesel and it'll be fine." It will not. Nothing comes out when you top up — the tank just carries more of the same mixture. The idea behind the advice — that diesel fuel systems accept petrol by percentage — is wrong.
If anything, the opposite holds. Myth: "A modern diesel can cope with a bit of petrol." Finer components and higher pressure are the way a newer diesel runs its fuel, and that makes the lubrication count more, not less.
One myth that catches people off guard: if it starts and drives, it must be unharmed. The driver of a petrol engine fed diesel usually stops, since it will not run, and the damage stops there. Nothing seems to have happened when a diesel fed petrol fires up, ticks over and drives away, as it usually does; meanwhile your pump wears. A running engine does not mean fine.
Not so: a two-stroke additive makes it safe to drive home. It was an old fix, meant for another problem. It doesn't put back what petrol has diluted, and that petrol is still inside that tank after that.
The next start sends petrol back round your pump out of the fuel lines and the fuel filter, where some of that sits after your engine has been run. That is why draining the tank yourself does not sort it — a myth. It is also genuinely hazardous to drain petrol into a can by the kerbside.
How does petrol in a diesel take place?
Nobody does it on purpose, and it is seldom carelessness. A diesel nozzle mostly won't fit a petrol motor, yet the narrower petrol nozzle goes into the filler of a diesel almost without resistance — so forecourts make this one mistake straightforward, and only in one direction.
It happens when routine and the car stop matching. A new motor, a hire car or a courtesy car. A household with one petrol and one diesel on the drive. A forecourt you know, only with its pumps laid out differently. A hurried fill on the way to Longport with a train to catch. A new-to-you diesel Volkswagen Golf, its first fuelling, and a motorist used to petrol: exactly when it takes place. With rain, a call coming in, or a car full of children to deal with, the hand just does what it always has.
Preventing petrol in a diesel next time you fill up around Brown Edge
- Green for unleaded and black for diesel is normal in the UK — yet not on each forecourt. Trust the label on the pump, not the colour.
- In a motor you do not know, look inside the flap over the filler or at the cap before your first fill: many vehicles print the fuel there.
- One of each in the house? Mark the key to your diesel — a bright fob, a sticker — because intending to remember is not enough.
- It seems daft and it works: on your first fill in a new or hired car, say "diesel" out loud before you lift the nozzle off the pump.
- Mistakes like this are straightforward to make while your mind is on something else, and so your phone goes away.
- Up to a point, a misfuel inhibitor helps: some diesels come with a filler built to block a petrol nozzle, and aftermarket devices exist for the rest. Count it as a safety net, and keep reading the pump.
- Less petrol makes a thinner mixture, and so stop the moment you realise — though remembering that the next step is unchanged. It is still not to start the vehicle.
Brown Edge: already put petrol in a diesel?
Then the order of things is brief. Don't crank it, and do not switch the ignition on. Ask the attendants to help you push it away from the petrol pump if you are still at the forecourt, whether that's Shell or somewhere else. Phone 0333 366 0103 next, with three facts — the fuel, the approximate amount, and if it's run.
Corrosion and deposits are the problem with AdBlue, where petrol brings lost protection. So if it was AdBlue, say so — and read its own Brown Edge page.
Brown Edge petrol in a diesel jobs: why one costs more than another
The four situations above are four separate tasks, so no single quote for this would be honest. What shifts your cost is mostly which of them you are in. Where your car is matters too, and whether a van can safely reach it, after the proportion of petrol to what the tank takes.
That is why our technicians ask three questions before pricing rather than after: what got in, how much, and whether it has run. The answers turn a range into a straight figure.
About Brown Edge, for a moment
Brown Edge is a village in Staffordshire, situated inland at an elevation of 202 metres, approximately 3.9 miles from Stoke-on-Trent. Brown Edge has a population of around 1494 people, with semi-detached housing being the predominant type. Brown Edge is located near other settlements such as Hill Top, Stockton Brook, and Hodgefield, and is about 137.7 miles from London.
Fuel drain cover in Brown Edge and across Staffordshire
Brown Edge sits in the ST postcode area, and the vans that answer petrol in diesel call-outs there work the places near it as well — Hill Top, Stockton Brook and Hodgefield among them. Our engineers drain wherever your vehicle is — your own driveway, a lay-by, a supermarket car park, a forecourt — so it never needs to come to us.
At the petrol pump in Brown Edge, still?
The best spot there is, then — that's where you are. Keep the vehicle turned off, and ring.