I’ve owned the car for almost 10 years now, currently at 225.050km.
Last year was a expensive year where I needed to replace both the 4 diesel injectors and the Diesel Particulate Filter (DPF). Now however my check engine light recently notified me about an issue. A bit scary after spending a lot of money not to long ago.
Last year I replaced the injectors and Diesel Particulate Filter (DPF) because my car failed it’s yearly MOT because of exhaust values. The injectors played a part in that and because two where faulty I decided to have all four replaced. It was not cheap so I feared the money spent was in vein when I saw the check engine warning light.
Luckily I have a Bluetooth OBD adapter that allows me to see the fault codes. In my case this turned out to be P2453. The code translated to “Diesel Particulate Filter, Pressure Sensor “A”, Improbable signal”.
At first this scared me because I suspected an issue with the new Diesel Particulate Filter (DPF) or that it would get ruined forcing me to replace the DPF again as a more modern car is not in the financial cards. And I could also smell a stronger exhaust smell when I had just started the car or stopped at traffic light for instance. Also this made me fear of getting another failure when the car needs it’s annual checkup and would not meet exhaust emissions standards like last year.
But aside from the smell I did not notice any weird performance degradation, higher fuel consumption etc. This put my mind at ease the it could just be the sensor itself, especially when I saw it’s a cheap part, about €30.
Then I saw the following post, where the location of the sensor turned out to be accessible and more importantly, that in their case it turned out that the last section, a piece of rubber hose, got damaged and leaked because of that.
https://forum.grandepuntoclub.nl/viewtopic.php?t=11680
Of course that piece of information gave me hope, a new piece of hose is a cheap fix of course. And it makes perfect sense that a hose like that needs replacing after 10 years.
The Photobucket picture no longer existed but luckily the Grandepuntoclub forum showed a preview of the picture giving me the perfect guide to the DPF pressure sensor.
When I checked this area on my car I was relieved to find a cracked hose in the same location. The first picture shows a overview of the engine bay. The DPF sensor is located above the engine close to the windshield, the hose in question is found on the bottom right next to the engine coolant expansion reservoir.
I ordered a replacement hose, but for now I fixed it using tape. Because I simply did not have enough space to get the current hose clips removed so I could replace the hose. Its effectively a sensor line so I don’t worry about it to much.
I cleared the P2453 fault code using a MOTOPOWER MP69040 Auto OBD2 Scanner and since then I have driven 800+km and the fault has not returned. Usually the fault code would return within a few km.
Also the exhaust smell I mentioned before is gone. Now that I know the sensor line was the source of that smell I am of course not surprised. And also glad I fixed this issue. I will still replace the hose in the near future when I do a oil- and coolant change. For now I’m glad to definitively know that the damaged hose was the root cause of the P2453 fault.