Colletts Green: Put Petrol in a Diesel Car?
Do not fire up your engine. If the fuel is still inside that tank and your engine has not turned over, a drain is nearly always all it needs — and that is determined in the following few minutes, not by how much went in. Petrol in Diesel drains and cleans wrongly fuelled cars where they are, all over Colletts Green and the remainder of Worcestershire, on the forecourt, by the roadside or on a driveway. Phone and our technicians can tell you what happens next before you do anything else.
Petrol in a diesel: what to do now
- Give a petrol motor diesel and it will typically refuse to run at all, and so the person stops there and so does the harm. Feed a diesel petrol and the thing starts, it ticks over, it pulls away — all right for a few miles. People have that muddled, which is the bit they get wrong about petrol in a diesel specifically. So do not start it. And having started, never believe it: that fuel system is grinding whenever you drive.
- Leave your ignition be also. Diesel has two jobs: it ignites, and before it ignites it protects your high-pressure pump and the injectors. Petrol does the first and not the second. Switching the car's ignition on is often sufficient to prime the system, which draws the petrol out of the tank then into precisely those parts.
- Topping up clears nothing. It gives you a larger tank of the same blend, because a diesel fuel system won't tolerate petrol by percentage in the way that advice presumes — so do not add diesel on top to dilute it. Grade is immaterial too: super unleaded is petrol.
- Remain where you are if you safely can. A car that has never shifted is the easiest one to deal with, and we'd rather come to a difficult place than have it started. If you're stopped on the verge on The Drive, put your hazards on then keep the car there.
- Find out where you are before phoning. A postcode that starts WR2 4, and the name of whatever is nearest to you. Otherwise the technician circles rather than showing up.
- What got in, roughly how many litres, and also whether the car has fired — those three facts determine the full call-out. Dial 0333 366 0103 then tell us.
The drive in is what sucked thinned diesel through your pump. Sitting still has pushed nothing. Petrol in a diesel Volkswagen Golf, left outside Worcester Foregate Street all day, sits idle in the tank while it waits. Ring us first — before the keys turn.
Tell us this much and our technicians can work with it: a diesel Peugeot 308, a few litres of unleaded in it, two miles or so, switched off at The Co-operative Food now. Time elapsed is not the thing our technicians need. Fuel drawn by your pump is.
Your diesel Ford Focus will have seemed entirely ordinary on the way back from Powick CofE Primary School. They do, and that is the snag with petrol in a diesel instead of the other way round. Put diesel in a petrol motor and it generally won't run, and so the motorist stops and the harm stops with them. Put petrol in a diesel and it fires up, idles and moves off as though nothing has happened — meanwhile the high-pressure pump keeps working without the lubrication your fuel is supposed to be providing. Nothing tells you, since from behind the wheel there is nothing to alert you about. Ring us with about how far you went and how hard you drove it; the second answer counts more than the first.
You head off at the end, once our technicians have started the engine and confirmed it runs smoothly on fresh diesel, with the fuel system bled. Before that, in the car park at Three Nuns, the tainted fuel comes out of that tank, your lines get cleaned and the fuel filter comes off where your Mercedes C-Class has a serviceable one. Everything begins with three questions when our technicians reach the car: what was put in, how much of it, and whether it has been started since.
Diesel has to be thick enough to seal the precision parts it passes through, and petrol dilutes it. That is the whole mechanism, and it accounts for the ordinary Powick Hospital Playing Field call: a diesel BMW 5 Series that travelled out there without complaint and came back down on power, lumpy at idle, perhaps smoking a little. A diesel injection system works hydraulically as well as chemically — it needs the fuel to hold pressure, not only to burn — so when your fuel thins, pressure that should build and stay built starts leaking past tolerances instead, and your engine gets a poorer, later, less even delivery than it was engineered about. None of that is the motor failing, which is the part worth hearing: it's your fuel no longer acting like diesel, and it stops when your fuel is put right.
Can petrol be taken from your diesel on a forecourt?
A large chunk of the work is done at a pump, since that's where it often kicks off. Still at JET? Then that is normally where it takes place. Station forecourts are everyday for us, with the agreement of the site.
At a forecourt, this gets stopped with your engine never run, and no place else does that. Fuel sucked out of the tank and through the fuel filter, all the way to the high-pressure pump, is what happens when the motor is started and your car is driven to where it is now: the car park, the drive or the lay-by, everywhere other than the forecourt. So the flush takes in the filter and the fuel lines as well as your tank. That is still not a catastrophe, and our technicians put it right where the vehicle stands. What determines it is whether the ignition was turned in the seconds after the till receipt was checked.
Clear of the petrol pump, the next motorist can get by — so yes, let the staff help you push it. Well worth it. Cranking the car just to move four vehicle lengths is not.
Areas our team cover around Colletts Green
These same runs get us to Dawshill, Kings End, Bastonford, Powick and Powick Village besides Colletts Green, which is a rural village.
Not on the list? That says nothing. The names above are just the nearest few, and most places in Worcestershire have a page of their own somewhere on this site. Close to the boundary, or somewhere a satnav struggles with? Ring us to enquire instead of presuming.
Use this map for the area included on this page. The car does not need to come to us. We operate over the lot — roadside, forecourts, driveways, car parks.
Colletts Green: stuck wherever you pulled up
Some people get no suitable spot to stop whatsoever. If you noticed after setting off and finished up along the verge of Bowling Green Road, or at a lay-by somewhere with your hazards flashing, that is a common call for us instead of an unusual one.
Whether you sit beside the vehicle or keep clear of it hangs on if staying nearby is wise. Every mile a diesel obliges you for on petrol draws that mixture further into your fuel system — and oblige it usually will, which is why your motor does not get restarted to limp somewhere handier. Pressing on causes the vehicle far more harm than a van coming out to an inconvenient spot, and that's no bother for us.
Some miles on petrol in a diesel: what now?
under 5 miles out of Colletts Green, your M5 is what counts here. A wrongly fuelled diesel will frequently take you onto it and some distance along before anything feels wrong, and the symptoms when they come are normally a drop in power, a lumpy idle and some smoke rather than a tidy stop.
Don't start it to move it. Come off at the first sensible exit then switch off. Presume the worst of that on a long drive. Anything approaching the under 5 miles to the closest city, and the mixture has been through the filter, through your pump, through your injectors. Say so when you phone. What we bring alters.
Colletts Green itself
Colletts Green is a small village in Worcestershire, situated near the city of Worcester and surrounded by other local places such as Dawshill and Kings End. Colletts Green has a population of around 969 people and is characterized by its predominantly detached housing. Colletts Green sits at an elevation of 55 metres, in a gently sloping inland area of the West Midlands region. Colletts Green is located approximately 3 miles from Worcester and 101.9 miles from London.
What we do when our engineers get to you around Colletts Green
- Our engineers find out what was put in, how much, and whether your motor has run. The answers alter the work, which is why our technicians ask before giving a price.
- Your tank is emptied of everything.
- What is left in the system shouldn't be what caused the issue, so the lines get flushed and your filter cleaned.
- Our engineers pour clean diesel in and bleed your system.
- We fire it up and check it runs properly on clean diesel.
Then it is ready to pull away. Our technicians do everything wherever your car has stopped, which means it never has to be taken to a garage, and when it has been noticed early, it is very rare for there to be long-term damage.
A different matter: AdBlue in a diesel tank in Colletts Green
The problem is not the same, though the first rule is — don't fire it up — if what got in was AdBlue rather than petrol. Petrol does two things to diesel: weakens it, and takes away the lubrication the fuel system relies on. AdBlue is urea in water, and in a diesel tank it causes rust and residue in its place.
Both are ours. There is a separate Colletts Green page for AdBlue removal, with the detail on it — including the reasons it frequently turns out to be the worse of the two.
What a petrol-in-diesel fuel drain costs around Colletts Green
What changes the figure is listed below, as this job is not one job and our engineers cannot honestly put a single number on this page.
- Started? Driven? Either answer matters more than anything else on this list.
- Wrong fuel in, against what that tank holds — that proportion.
- The kind of liquid in the tank, petrol or AdBlue.
- Whether a van can sensibly reach the vehicle and work on it, which depends on where the vehicle is.
Tell us what your car is, how much went in, and if your motor has run. A firm answer comes back, not a range. If it's not pressing — the vehicle is at home and going nowhere — works too.
Petrol in diesel: frequent questions in Colletts Green
Fuel drains on a Colletts Green petrol station forecourt
A large portion of this work takes place there, so yes. Tell us which one you're at when you ring and we will tell you if our technicians can work there. With the site's consent we visit Gulf and the other forecourts locally routinely.
A couple of litres of petrol in a diesel — too much?
It hinges on the ratio rather than the litres, and far more on whether your engine has run. What settles how much work is required is if that blend has been sucked through the fuel system — since although five litres in an almost empty tank is a distinct situation from five in a full one, either way that is the query.
Petrol in my diesel, and I have driven the vehicle
Switch off somewhere sensible, then keep it that way after you stop. It's salvageable a lot more frequently than drivers assume, even though driving is what moves the problem from the tank into the pump and injectors — and the single most useful thing you can do now is not restart it.
My warranty — does a fuel drain void it?
No. Carried out correctly, emptying and flushing is no modification at all, and the warranty from your manufacturer is untouched by it. A disagreement over a warranty is likelier to come from running a diesel on petrol — so leave it turned off.
Two-stroke oil in that tank, and then home?
No. Two-stroke oil is an old fix for a separate problem and it doesn't replace what petrol has diluted. Petrol stays in that tank after that, whatever else goes in, and your pump gets no break from it.
Do I need a main dealer for petrol in a diesel?
Wherever your car is, we drain and flush it there, so a drive to the main dealer does not come into it.
You, and the vehicle, still together?
Switched off is how it stays.
Already driven it? Then pull over somewhere safe, turn off, then let it remain that way. A stationary, cold car is the best place to be in, and this is recoverable from far more commonly than motorists expect.
At the kerbside, on the forecourt or at home — call-out fuel draining around Colletts Green and throughout Worcestershire.