How Worried Should You Be? Petrol in a Diesel Car in Double View
Not started? Then less anxious than you probably feel. Till the ignition primes the pump, the starter turns, or your car is driven, petrol in a diesel tank simply sits there and does no harm. Which means the truthful reply to that first Double View query — "have I wrecked it?" — normally no. Leave the motor off and call Petrol in Diesel — that is how you keep it like that. Keep reading for three things: the effect petrol has inside a diesel engine, the clues of how far it has spread, and ways to make sure you never do it again.
What petrol in a diesel does to the engine
Diesel does two tasks on its way through a motor. It ignites, and before it burns it protects. Built to very fine gaps, your injectors and the pump depend on your diesel moving through them to keep their surfaces from wearing against one another.
Petrol handles the first job poorly and the second not at all. Being less viscous than diesel, petrol strips out the protection a fuel system needs, so a pump running on the blend to wear itself. It's equally made to resist igniting under compression — the reverse of what a diesel needs — which is why you get the clattering.
Taken together, they make clear the shape the problem takes. Contact does not do the damage — movement does. Where the petrol is only in your tank, it's a fault of fuel, nothing more. A pump that has been labouring on that petrol is the beginning of a mechanical one, and whatever a worn pump sheds moves on with the fuel to the injectors downstream.
Double View, petrol in a diesel: four cases, from mild to major
The best case there can be: filled up, not once started. At a forecourt, and truly only there, that petrol is still limited to the tank — since anywhere else the vehicle was driven to get to it. The job is emptying and rinsing on the spot.
Started for a second, or just your ignition on. Petrol has come out of your tank and reached the filter and your lines, since the fuel system has been primed. Drain, flush, deal with the fuel filter: still usually simple.
A few miles driven, and your pump has spent each of them labouring on diluted fuel. Tank, lines, filter, then fresh fuel put through the entire circuit: that's this work, and the way the car was driven matters as much as the mileage. Short trips, like the school run to Forest View Primary School, are one thing. Very different again: a run to Gloucester, under 15 miles away, or some distance on the M50, under 10 miles from Double View, where the engine never stopped labouring hard.
Clattering, a lumpy idle, smoke, a throttle gone soft: driven till it complained. What you are hearing is the motor reporting fuel that no longer acts like diesel. Leave it wherever it has stopped: a lay-by, a side street, the verge on Mousell Lane. A car stopped soon very rarely has permanent damage, since the drain and the flush-through, which still come first, take care of it.
Myths Double View people hear about petrol in a diesel
"Top it up the rest of the way with diesel and it will be fine" — a myth. It will not. Topping up removes nothing; it gives you a fuller tank of the same mix. Percentage isn't how a diesel fuel system tolerates petrol, whatever that advice presumes.
If anything, the reverse holds. Myth: "A current diesel can cope with a bit of petrol." At higher pressure, through finer parts: that's how a current diesel handles its fuel, so the lubrication counts more, not less.
The myth that catches motorists out: if it starts and drives, it must be unharmed. The driver of a petrol motor fed diesel usually stops, since it will not run, and the harm stops there. Feed petrol to a diesel and it generally starts, idles and pulls away like nothing has happened — all while its pump wears. Being able to run is not proof of being fine.
Myth: "Add some two-stroke oil and drive the vehicle home." It's an old fix for a separate fault. That petrol is still inside the tank after that, and whatever it has diluted is not put back.
Myth: "Drain that tank yourself and you're sorted." Once the engine has been run, some of the petrol is no longer inside that tank: it's in your filter and the lines, and it goes right back through the pump at the next start. It's also genuinely risky to drain petrol into a can at the kerbside.
Petrol in a diesel: how does it happen?
No one does it on purpose, and it is seldom carelessness. The forecourt makes it simple: the petrol nozzle is the slimmer of the two, and it slides into a diesel filler with almost no resistance, whilst a diesel nozzle mostly will not go into a petrol car at all. So the slip runs one way.
The moment routine stops matching the vehicle is the moment it occurs. Hire cars, courtesy cars, and cars that are new to you. A household with one petrol and one diesel on the drive. Your usual forecourt, its pumps now in a different order. Rushing for a train at Lydney and filling up en route. Years of petrol vehicles behind you, a diesel Renault Megane in front of you on the forecourt for its first tank — that's when. With rain, a call arriving, or a car full of children to deal with, your hand just does what it always has.
Preventing petrol in a diesel next time you fill up around Double View
- Not every forecourt in the UK keeps to green for unleaded and black for diesel, though most usually do. Check the pump's label; the colour is just a clue.
- Many vehicles state the fuel inside the filler flap or on the cap, so check it on the first fill in a car you don't know.
- A coloured fob or a sticker on your diesel's key achieves more than any amount of intending to remember, for a house with one of each.
- Before the nozzle comes off the pump the first time you fuel a hired or new car, say "diesel" aloud. Daft, perhaps, yet it works.
- Tuck the phone away. This is an easy mistake to make while you are thinking about something else.
- Add-on devices exist for motors without one, and some diesels come with a filler that will not accept a petrol nozzle. Helpful — but a safety net only, never a reason to stop checking the label.
- Stop as soon as you realise. Less petrol inside your tank means a weaker mix. It does not change what to do next, which is still not to fire it up.
Double View: already put petrol in a diesel?
Then, there is only a short order of things. Leave it unstarted, with the ignition switched off as well. Yet at the forecourt, at EG on the move or anywhere else? Ask the attendants to help you roll the vehicle clear of the pump. Next, 0333 366 0103. We'll ask what went in, roughly how much, and if it's been run.
Corrosion and deposits form the problem with AdBlue, whereas petrol means lost protection. So if it was AdBlue, say so — and read its own Double View page.
One petrol in a diesel job around Double View costs more than another. Why?
There is no honest single quote for this, because the four situations above are four separate jobs. Which of them you're in is mostly what shifts your cost. Two things come after that: the petrol that went in as a share of what the tank takes, then the spot the vehicle is in and whether a van can reach it safely.
That's why our engineers ask three queries before quoting rather than after: what was put in, how much, and if it has run. Those answers turn a range into a straight figure.
About Double View itself
Double View is a suburban area in Gloucestershire, situated inland at an elevation of 244 metres, approximately 10.9 miles from Gloucester. Double View is characterized by its semi-detached housing and is located near other residential areas such as Mount Pleasant and Littledean Hill. Double View sits within the wider landscape of the South West region, with the city of Gloucester and the Forest of Dean nearby. Double View has a population of around 3927 residents.
Fuel drain cover across Gloucestershire, Double View included
Double View rests in the GL postcode area, and the teams that answer petrol in diesel jobs there work the locations around it as well — Mount Pleasant, Littledean Hill and Cinderford among them. The vehicle does not need to move to us: our technicians drain at a forecourt, in a supermarket car park, in a lay-by or on your own drive.
In Double View and still at the petrol pump?
Then, you couldn't be in a better place. Turned off it stays; then call.