Should You Worry? Petrol in a Diesel Car in Walbottle
Not started? Then less worried than you likely are. Everyone around Walbottle begins with "have I ruined it?", and the honest answer is normally no: petrol resting in that tank of any diesel remains harmless until priming, cranking or driving pulls it into the fuel system. Keep it like that: leave your motor off then phone Petrol in Diesel. What petrol really does to a diesel, how to judge how far it's gone, and how to keep it from happening a second time: that's the remainder of this page.
Petrol in a diesel: what does it do to the motor?
Two jobs fall to diesel on its route through a motor. It protects first, and only then does it burn. Designed to very fine tolerances, the fuel injectors and the pump depend on the diesel moving through them to keep their surfaces from wearing against one another.
Badly at the first, not at all at the second: that is petrol. Being less viscous than diesel, petrol strips out the lubrication a fuel system needs, leaving a pump running on the blend to wear itself. It's also made to resist igniting under compression — the reverse of what a diesel needs — which is why you hear the knocking.
The shape of the issue is clear when you put those together. The damage is done by movement, not by contact. All a tank with petrol in it amounts to is a fuel problem. Once the pump has been working on that petrol, a mechanical fault has started: anything shed by a pump that is grinding travels onward to your injectors with your fuel.
Petrol in a diesel in Walbottle: how bad is it? Four cases
Filled up, and not started: nothing beats it. That petrol is inside your tank and only your tank, and the task is a drain and a flush where your car sits. This is the one situation that can only truly take place on a forecourt, since anywhere else the vehicle has been driven to get there.
The ignition switched on, or a brief start. With the system primed, your lines and filter now hold petrol that has come from the tank. Still normally straightforward: drain, flush, and your filter dealt with.
The pump has worked a few miles on weakened fuel — that is what driving it does. Tank, lines, filter, then fresh fuel put through the whole circuit: that's this work, and the way the car was driven counts as much as the distance. On the school run to Walbottle Village Primary School, the mileage is short. Driving as far as Newcastle upon Tyne, under 10 miles away, makes a very different task — as does any mileage on the Central Motorway East, under 5 miles from Walbottle, with the engine running hard the whole time.
Rattling, a ragged idle, smoke, a throttle gone soft: driven until it complained. The engine is telling you the fuel is no longer acting like diesel. Whether it is the verge on The Green, a lay-by or a side road, stop where you are and leave it. Permanent damage is very unusual when a vehicle is stopped quickly, and the drain and flush that still come first take care of it.
Stories Walbottle people hear about petrol in a diesel
It will not be fine. The myth: "Fill it the rest of the way with diesel and it will be." A fuller tank of the same mixture is all it gives, since topping up takes out nothing. The assumption behind the advice — that diesel fuel systems accept petrol by percentage — is wrong.
Not so: a modern diesel copes with a bit of petrol. If anything, the opposite. Protection counts more on newer diesels, not less, because their fuel passes through smaller parts at higher pressure.
This is the one that fools drivers. Myth: "If it starts and drives, there is no harm done." Feed diesel to a petrol motor and it usually won't run, and so the motorist stops — and the harm stops with them. A diesel fed petrol normally starts, idles and drives away as though nothing has happened, whilst your pump wears. Fine and running are not the same thing.
Not so: a two-stroke additive makes it safe to drive home. It was an old workaround, meant for another problem. The petrol is still inside that tank after that, and whatever it has diluted is not put back.
Myth: "Drain the tank yourself and you're sorted." Once the motor has been run, some of the petrol is no longer inside your tank: it is in your filter and your lines, and it goes right back through the pump on your next start. Besides, petrol emptied into a can by the road is truly risky.
How petrol ends up: petrol in a diesel
A careless moment is seldom the cause, and nobody means to do it. A diesel nozzle mostly won't go into a petrol vehicle, but the slimmer petrol nozzle goes into the filler of a diesel nearly without resistance — so forecourts make this one mistake easy, and just in that direction.
The moment habit stops matching the vehicle is the moment it occurs. Hire cars, courtesy cars, and motors that are new to you. A household with one petrol and one diesel on the driveway. A forecourt you know, only with its pumps laid out differently. A train to catch, and a hurried fill on the way to Blaydon. Years of petrol motors behind you, a diesel Volkswagen Golf in front of you on the forecourt for its first tank — that's when. Add rain, a phone call or a back seat full of children, and the hand does what it has always done.
Preventing petrol in a diesel next time you fill up in Walbottle
- Check the petrol pump, not the colour. In the UK unleaded handles are usually green and diesel black, yet not on each forecourt. The label is what matters.
- In a car you do not know, look inside the flap over your filler or at the cap before the first fill: plenty of cars state the fuel there.
- One of each in the house? Mark your key to your diesel — a bright fob, a sticker — because intending to remember isn't enough.
- Say it before you lift it. On the first fill in a new or hired car, say "diesel" out loud before you lift the nozzle off the petrol pump. It seems silly and it does the trick.
- Thinking about something else is when this becomes an easy mistake to make, so put your phone away then keep your mind on the pump.
- Up to a point, a misfuel inhibitor helps: some diesels come with a filler designed to reject a petrol nozzle, and add-on devices are available for the rest. Treat it as a backstop, then keep reading the pump.
- Less petrol makes a weaker blend, so stop the moment you realise — while remembering that your next stage is unchanged. It's still not to crank it.
Already put petrol in a diesel in Walbottle?
The order of things is brief, then. Leave it unstarted, with your ignition off as well. Yet on the forecourt, at Gulf or anywhere else? Ask the staff to help you roll the car clear of the petrol pump. Then phone 0333 366 0103 and tell us what went in, about how much, and whether it has run.
AdBlue, not petrol? Then tell us. Corrosion and deposits, not lost lubrication, make it a different fault — Walbottle has a page all for it.
What makes one Walbottle petrol in a diesel job cost more than the next
There is no fair single price for this, since the four situations above are four different jobs. Chiefly, the cost moves with which situation you're in. Two things follow that: the petrol that got in as a proportion of what the tank takes, then the place your car is in and whether our van can get to it safely.
Before any quote, not after, come three questions: the fuel that got in, the quantity, and if it's run. That is why. A range turns into a straight figure once those replies are in.
About Walbottle itself
Walbottle is a small village in Tyne and Wear, situated approximately 5 miles west of Newcastle upon Tyne. Walbottle sits at an elevation of 61 metres, in a predominantly inland area of the North East region. Walbottle has a mix of housing types, but is predominantly characterised by terraced homes. Walbottle is close to nearby places such as Newburn and Throckley, and is about 249 miles north of London.
Fuel drain cover around Walbottle and across Tyne and Wear
Walbottle waits in the NE postcode area, and the teams that answer petrol in diesel call-outs there work the places near it as well — Newburn, Throckley and North Walbottle among them. You need not bring the car to us. Forecourts, supermarket car parks, lay-bys and your own driveway are all places we drain.
Walbottle: still at the petrol pump?
No position is better: that's where you now are. Turned off it stays; then call.