Over time, all vehicles will start performing less efficiently due to several reasons. Among them, fuel contamination is considered as one of the leading causes of premature engine component wear and even engine failure if symptoms are ignored for a sufficient time period. Due to that, it is quite important to ensure that fuel used by your vehicle’s engine is of good quality and free from foreign contaminants as much as possible.Modern engines do have some measures to protect their systems from excessive contamination: this is often the task of a vehicle’s diesel filtration system, which uses a series of filtering devices to separate unwanted contaminants from the fuel itself before it is routed to the injectors and engine itself.
When changed on a regular basis, fuel filters can manage to do their job well enough: nevertheless, they also cannot do anything if you use particularly bad fuel or if enough contaminants have found their way into the fuel tank.While there is no efficient way to convert bad fuel into good fuel other than changing the place where you fuel up your vehicle, you can get rid of fuel tank contaminants if you are able to somehow get access to it and take it outside for a quick clean-up. To do this, you will need to locate your vehicle’s fuel tank first: sometimes, you can gain access to it quite easily, while other vehicles may have it well hidden behind other parts that you will need to remove first.Cleaning of a fuel tank is easier the less fuel it carries. Make sure to run your vehicle dry so that you don’t have to take out a large amount of fuel (the tank needs to be fully emptied for a clean-up to be successful). The fuel that you take out can just be stored in a closed container while you clean the tank, or be thrown away altogether it is found to be highly contaminated.Once you have taken the tank out and drained it, start by cleaning the exterior by using a high-pressure water jet: this ensures that debris from outside doesn’t accidentally fall into the tank during the cleaning procedure. The tank interior can be cleaned in pretty much the same manner, with the addition of soap to remove sticky deposits.
To finish it off, let the tank out to dry in the sun, or use a blast of compressed air to make the whole process faster. Either way, you need to ensure that no water is present in the tank when installing it back.As you can see, cleaning fuel tanks isn’t a hard process. Sadly, cleaning your tank at home may not be possible in some instances. A few fuel tanks may have complex shapes that make cleaning them at home impractical: you can take them to a service centre and ask for a full diesel engine cleaning or just replace the tank with a new one. The latter may also be the preferred option to take if you find out that the tank is rusted or physically damaged.In conclusion, cleaning your vehicle’s fuel tank may be a simple way of prolonging its service life, provided that the clean-up itself is doable.
