A reminder about injector cleaning

[gto78]

Just a friendly reminder with a short story behind it. My wife's explorer's mileage took a nose dive this month so I did some preventive maintenance like installing new plugs, cleaning the MAF and washing the air filter etc. None of these things seemed to make much difference.

I realized that it had never had a professional pressurized fuel injector cleaning service. So I made my own fuel injector cleaning machine/pressure pot. On ebay they sell for around 200$ which is out of my budget by about $200... Anyways I built one out of a paint gun kit from harbor freight for $29, combined with a fuel pump test kit from harbor freight for $10. It screws onto the fuel rail of the engine. I disabled the fuel pump and ran the engine from the injector cleaner machine for 10 minutes until it ran out of cleaner. The cleaner is made by BG, also sold on ebay. It's a powerful cleaner that cleans the combustion chamber, injectors, and valves.

I filled the fuel tank and gave the truck back to my wife. Our gas mileage has returned, and in fact is better than ever. Our best average fuel economy used to be @65 mph with approx 21-23mpg. Now we get 24+ mpg @70mph. I'll have to see what we get at 65mph now also, but this last tank was @ 70.

Not bad for a vehicle with that many miles which is rated at 17 mpg when brand new. It's almost the same as my stock 350Z.

My whole point is to remind others to occasionally have their fuel injectors cleaned with an actual cleaning machine. I think dealers charge about $85 for the service.