Petrol in diesel

[Jamie_C]

Hello i've made the mistake of putting 5litres of petrol in my diesel tank, so i got towed home without starting it. how do i drain the tank. also is it safe to tow a tiptronic at 50mph in neutrel....

[Andy J]

I did this with a pug 307 a few years ago, I put £10 in before realising, I just topped the tank up with Deisel the car was new with about 5000 miles on it I never had a problem so I would say 5ltrs wouldn't be a problem.

[Marco34]

Hello i've made the mistake of putting 5litres of petrol in my diesel tank, so i got towed home without starting it. how do i drain the tank. also is it safe to tow a tiptronic at 50mph in neutrel....

If you've got a 130 PD I would have it drained completely. 10 litres is far too much. As you havn't started a complete drain will suffice, no need to change fuel filter. I thought I was putting in BPs ulitmate diesel put put in £35 of ultimate petrol years ago. I got a tow to a place which was very customed to perfroming such jobs. Sadly it cost me £75. They go in the boot and physically get into the fuel tank to drain the lot. Mine survived that. It's getting it to such a place???? Possibly you could siphon it yourself from the tank.. Not sure how easy it is...

[Andy J]

If you've got a 130 PD I would have it drained completely. 10 litres is far too much. As you started a complete drain will suffice, no need to change fuel filter. I thought I was putting in ulitmate diesel put put in £35 of ultimate petrol years ago. I got a tow to a place which was verycustomed to perfroming such jobs. Sadly it cost me £75. They go in the boot and physically get into the fuel tank to drain the lot. Mine survived that. It's getting it to such a place???? Possibly you could siphon it yourself from the tank.. Not sure how easy it is...

He's only put 5ltrs in not 10 so I wouldn't think it's a problem, certainly wasn't with my pug 307 2.0 HDI, even the Peugeot main dealers said no problem. Surely 5 ltrs diluted into 75 ltrs will hardly be noticable.

[zollaf]

you can safely put 25% petrol into a diesel with no problems. this is the official vw guidelines, or was upto 2004. just top up with diesel as often as you can to dilute it.

[Marco34]

you can safely put 25% petrol into a diesel with no problems. this is the official vw guidelines, or was upto 2004. just top up with diesel as often as you can to dilute it.

This advice is poor....

Only 5 litres

No way would I run the risk. 5 litres in modern PD engines is a no no. Do a search and see. Official VW guidelines, show me?

Referencing to Peugeot is no help. Audi do not recommend any petrol mix with deisel. A pint maybe. The injectors on moder VW/Audis run at 25000psi. 5 litres is alot in these engines. Yiou 'may' get away with it, you may not.

jamie - the choice is yours but it could easily conk out and cause damage well beyond a proper drain... see some info below.

Can I dilute the petrol with diesel?

Diluting contaminated fuel may be possible on older cars that lack the fine, high-pressure diesel injection systems of modern diesels. However, this is a high-risk move which could result in the destruction of your engine. It may be possible to dilute a proportion of petrol to diesel under 10% in such cars, though there´s no guarantee this will work. Your car may run roughly for a while and you may risk long-term damage that is not immediately apparent. We don´t recommend you try this but if you do risk it you need to be completely sure about your car´s fuel tank and engine system - try this on a common-rail diesel and you´ll simply wreck your engine.

[danclyon]

This advice is poor....

Only 5 litres

No way would I run the risk. 5 litres in modern PD engines is a no no. Do a search and see. Official VW guidelines, show me?

Referencing to Peugeot is no help. Audi do not recommend any petrol mix with deisel. A pint maybe. The injectors on moder VW/Audis run at 25000psi. 5 litres is alot in these engines. Yiou 'may' get away with it, you may not.

jamie - the choice is yours but it could easily conk out and cause damage well beyond a proper drain... see some info below.

Can I dilute the petrol with diesel?

Diluting contaminated fuel may be possible on older cars that lack the fine, high-pressure diesel injection systems of modern diesels. However, this is a high-risk move which could result in the destruction of your engine. It may be possible to dilute a proportion of petrol to diesel under 10% in such cars, though there´s no guarantee this will work. Your car may run roughly for a while and you may risk long-term damage that is not immediately apparent. We don´t recommend you try this but if you do risk it you need to be completely sure about your car´s fuel tank and engine system - try this on a common-rail diesel and you´ll simply wreck your engine.

Having just done this on a friends Golf - It's quite an easy siphon job with simple pipe from a pet shop (aquarium filter pipe seems to work well).
Takes a while and you have to be a bit "liberal" with the shaking it about a bit to get ti down into the tank, but it's not tricky to do - and it's all the AA do when your stepfather accidentally put 60l of VPower petrol in your mothers Diesel Volvo - just they had a small insulated leccy pump to speed the process up, but they did it on the Shell forecourt (her V70 has the old Audi 5 cyl diesel in it).

You get "most of" it out - meaning that the concentration of what is left is something like a cup full in 70 litres when you refill - making the petrol of negligible concentration.

The AA chap reported no ill effects on his wifes A3 when she had done it and he used the same approach and she'd brimmed the diesel tank with Unleaded....

Taking the tank off is a lot of work and won't achieve much more than you can do with a simple syphon.

Hth,
Cheers,
Dan.

[Marco34]

I'd follow Dans advice.. Sounds good to me. It isn't worth the risk.

[adamss24]

Fill it up to the brim and it will run even better than with normal diesel There is common practice to put a few litres of petrol to a tank of diesel in europe durring cold winters to stop the fuel from gelling ! It might take a bit longer to start but it wont do no dammage.

[Andy J]

This advice is poor....


Referencing to Peugeot is no help. Audi do not recommend any petrol mix with deisel. A pint maybe. The injectors on moder VW/Audis run at 25000psi. 5 litres is alot in these engines.

Peugeot run at 1800 bar which is 26000psi