DPF, Regens, and Fuel Treatments

A Diesel particulate filter’s (DPF) job is to remove harmful soot and ash from diesel exhaust gas to reduce air pollution. Erik demystifies DPFs in this video here, but the short and sweet of it is that in order not to get fully plugged up with all of those exhaust particulates, the dpf has to clean itself out by burning what’s clogging it into ash.

Rocky Rohde produced a video on the importance of a DPF regeneration cycle. In the video, Rocky Rohde explains, “To extend the life of your emissions system, and your DPF and all that stuff is knowing when it needs to do a regen, but you don’t even know that it’s going to do it unless you have a monitor like the iDash SuperGauge. You could be driving that truck for a week in town and it’s trying to do a regen, you don’t have a clue that it’s trying to complete the cycle, so your mileage is going to be worse because it’s dumping fuel in the exhaust. If you get that DPF all heated up, and it starts to get ready to convert that stuff to ash and blow it out, and then you shut it down… that really bad for the truck. You want to do a full cycle, letting it get done and then you’re good. So, monitoring is important.”