--- title: Drain Petrol From a Diesel Car — Portsoy canonical: https://www.petrolinadieselcar.co.uk/petrol-in-diesel/portsoy-aberdeenshire/ location: Portsoy county: Aberdeenshire latitude: 57.683310 longitude: -2.691500 service: Petrol in a Diesel Car updated: 2026-10-23 --- # Portsoy: Put Petrol in a Diesel Car? If you have not turned on the motor as yet, don't. A fuel drain and nothing more is nearly always what a vehicle needs while the petrol is still in that tank and your engine has not run, which is why it's the next few minutes that matter, not how much was put in. Petrol in Diesel goes to the car wherever it has come to rest in Portsoy or the rest of Aberdeenshire, on the forecourt, by the roadside or on a driveway, and drains and cleans it there. We can show you what the following move will be. Phone — that goes before all else. ## What to do now about petrol in a diesel - Don't crank it. Turned on anyway? Then never depend on it. Diesel in a petrol car generally won't run, so the motorist stops and the wear ends with them. Petrol in a diesel? It starts. It ticks over. It drives off normally, for a couple of miles. Motorists get that backwards. It isn't all right — the fuel system is grinding every mile you drive. - Diesel ignites, and before it combusts it greases — your injection pump, its injectors. Petrol handles only the burning. So leave the car's ignition be also: switching it on is often all it takes to prime the system, and priming pulls petrol from your tank into exactly those parts. - Topping up removes nothing. It hands you a bigger tank of the same mixture, since a diesel fuel system does not accept petrol by percentage in the way that advice implies — so do not add diesel on top to weaken it. Type is immaterial too: super unleaded is petrol. - A motor that has not shifted is the simplest one to sort, and so remain where you are if you reasonably can. Stopped on the verge on The Square? Hazards on, and keep it there. A difficult spot works for us better than a started diesel. - Before you phone, gather your location. Anything nearest to you with a label on it, plus a postcode that starts AB45 2 — that is what settles whether the technician shows up or circles. - Call 0333 366 0103. Expect three points — what got in, roughly how much, and whether the motor has been started. Those replies decide whatever comes after. ## Removing petrol from the diesel at the forecourt Most of this work starts at the pump, so a big part of it ends up finished at one. If you are still at the forecourt at the nearest petrol station, that is normally where this drain happens — we work on station forecourts routinely, with the site's permission. A forecourt is the only place the mistake can be stopped before your motor has run. Fuel pulled out of that tank and through your filter, all the way to the high-pressure pump, is what occurs when your engine is switched on and the vehicle is moved to where it is now: the car park, the drive or the lay-by, everywhere other than the forecourt. So the flush covers the fuel filter and your lines along with that tank. That is still not a catastrophe, and our engineers deal with it where your car sits. What determines it is whether the key was turned in the seconds after the till receipt was checked. Roll it out of the way if the attendants volunteer, and they normally will. The next motorist gets by the pump, and that's worth doing. Starting the car to shift four vehicle lengths is not. ## Coverage near Portsoy Being a coastal town, Portsoy gets a routine call, and the areas close by come along on that same journey: Seatown and Sandend, Fordyce and Boyndie, Brodiesord. Our technicians do come. Those places above are merely the nearest neighbours, and a page is there for most towns across Aberdeenshire, and so an absence from the list is not an absence from our coverage. Guessing is the habit to skip, above all on a boundary or somewhere your satnav fails. Call us and ask. See this map for the patch included here. Roadside, forecourt, private drive, car park: all of that is territory our technicians cover, and none of that asks the car to travel to us. Your diesel Audi A4 will have seemed perfectly ordinary on the way back from the local primary school. They all do, and that is the snag with petrol in a diesel and not the other way round. Put diesel in a petrol car and it usually will not run, and so the person stops and the damage stops with them. Put petrol in a diesel and it starts, idles and drives off as though nothing has happened — meanwhile your high-pressure pump does its work without the lubrication the fuel is meant to be supplying. Nothing warns you, since from the driver's seat there is nothing to warn you about. Phone with about how far you went and how hard you worked it; the second answer matters more than the first. ## Stranded on the kerbside around Portsoy A chance to pull over somewhere sensible does not fall to everybody. Hazards going in a lay-by somewhere, or stopped on the verge of North High Street because you noticed after setting off — our technicians take that call often enough that it is the ordinary kind. Safe right there? Sit with it. Not fine? Get out and clear of it. Every mile a diesel obliges you for on petrol pulls the mix further into the fuel system — and oblige it frequently will, which is why the motor does not get restarted to limp somewhere safer. Carrying on does the car far more harm than a technician driving out to a difficult place, and that's no trouble for us. Straightforward job, this one — until somebody takes it home. A diesel Ford Focus left by The Shore Inn with petrol in your tank loses nothing by standing there overnight, so leave the car then call us once it is light. Expect a query about the run there, though. Short and cold is exactly where petrol fails to burn, and what won't burn can get past the rings then into the engine oil. ## Already run it? Petrol in a diesel after a couple of miles over 50 miles out of Portsoy, the M90 is what counts now. A wrongly fuelled diesel will usually get you onto it and some way along before anything seems wrong, and the signs when they arrive are typically a drop in power, an uneven idle and smoke rather than a neat stop. Take the next exit that is safe, stop there, and do not start the vehicle to reposition. It alters what our engineers bring, and so mention it when you call: on a longer run — anything near the under 50 miles to the closest city — assume the petrol has been through the fuel filter, your pump and the injectors. Out there happy, back gutless. If that was the trip to Wally Green, look at the tank. Diesel gets diluted by petrol, and thin fuel leaks past the fine tolerances supposed to build injection pressure — so every additional mile the diesel Mercedes C-Class covered, the less pressure it held onto. Somewhere sensible, turn off, phone us. ## Where's Portsoy? Portsoy is a small town situated on the north-east coast of Scotland, in Aberdeenshire, with a population of around 1727 people. Portsoy sits at an elevation of 19 metres, looking out over the Moray Firth, and is characterized by its semi-detached housing. Portsoy is located near other small communities such as Seatown, Sandend, and Fordyce, and is approximately 43 miles from the city of Aberdeen. Portsoy has a scenic coastal setting, with the town's layout influenced by its proximity to the sea. ## The job in Portsoy, step by step - The answers shape the work, which is why our technicians ask before pricing: what got in, how much of that, and whether your engine has run. - Your tank is emptied of everything. - Lines purged, filter cleared. Whatever is left afterwards is not the thing that started the problem. - Fresh diesel goes in, and then the system gets primed. - It is fired up with clean diesel in it, and our technicians confirm that it's running smoothly. Your car is then ready for you to pull away. Our technicians do all of it wherever your car has come to a stop, which means it never needs to go to a garage, and if it has been spotted early, it's very rare for there to be lasting damage. Leave the BMW 1 Series by Portsoy Community Church and ring us. We're firm about not driving on as a worn-out pump loses, and what it sheds travels onward with the fuel to your injectors downstream. ## AdBlue in a diesel tank around Portsoy is a separate job If what was put in was AdBlue instead of petrol, the opening instruction is unchanged — never crank it — but the fault isn't. Petrol does two things to diesel: weakens it, and takes away the protection the fuel system depends on. Corrosion and deposits are what a diesel tank gets instead, because AdBlue is urea dissolved in water. Our technicians handle both, and AdBlue removal around Portsoy has its own page with the detail — including why it's frequently the more serious of the two. ## How much is a petrol-in-diesel drain around Portsoy? We can't put one figure on this page frankly, because the job is not one job. What changes it: - Started? Driven? Either answer matters more than anything else on this list. - How much of the wrong fuel was put in, set against how much your tank holds. - The type of fluid in the tank, petrol or AdBlue. - Access: the car's position, and if working on it there's sensible for a technician. The vehicle, the amount, whether it has run — give us those and the answer comes back straight and not as a range. Not pressing, with the car at home and going nowhere? Then works. Flushed, not drained — that is what a diesel Hyundai Tucson which got as far as Institute Hall needs. Running a diesel puts that mixture into the filter, your lines, your pump and its rail, none of which empties with that tank, and so by now your tank holds the smaller part of the trouble. ## Portsoy drivers ask us these about petrol in diesel ## At a petrol station around Portsoy, can you do a fuel drain there? A large part of this work takes place there, so yes. Our technicians attend another forecourt nearby and the other forecourts around town regularly, with the owner's consent — tell us which one you're at when you ring and we'll tell you whether our engineers can work there. ## Is there a safe quantity of petrol in a diesel? It hinges on the ratio instead of the litres, and a lot more on whether the engine has run. Five litres into an almost dry tank isn't five into a full one, no. But both land on the same question in the end: has that mixture been drawn right through, or has it not? ## I drove the car after putting petrol in my diesel. What now? Pull in somewhere safe, switch off, then leave the vehicle off. Driving takes the issue along — out of your tank, into the pump and injectors. Drivers fear it a good deal more than the recovery rate warrants, mind. The one really useful thing left to you is not restarting it. ## Fuel drains and manufacturer warranties No. Carried out correctly, draining and flushing is no alteration at all, and the warranty from your manufacturer is untouched by it. An argument over a warranty is likelier to come from running a diesel on petrol — so leave it switched off. ## Can I just add two-stroke oil and drive home? Two-stroke oil solves a distinct fault, and an old one at that. Nothing it does puts back what petrol thinned. No. The pump still has to cope with it, since your tank still has petrol in it later. ## A main dealer for petrol in a diesel — essential? Wherever your car is, our technicians drain and clean it there, so a visit to the main dealer does not come into it. ## Is the vehicle still with you? Keep the engine switched off. Turn it off somewhere safe and leave it off, if you have already driven it. Cold, still, going nowhere: that's the best position to be in. Drivers fear this a lot more than they need to. Emptying misfuelled motors, Portsoy and the rest of Aberdeenshire, wherever they are. Kerbside. Forecourt. Home.