How to Clean Fuel Injectors

There’s really only two ways to clean your car’s fuel injection system. Do it yourself or take it to a professional. Ok, ok, so I’m a wise-guy! No really, that is the choice, and dependent on the complexity of your car, truck, boat, RV, or whatever it is, on the “do it yourself” side, you really also only have two choices, a) dumping in a pre-made product into the fuel reservoir, or b) dis-assembly and the use of either an injection type cleaning solution, or real down-and-get-your-hands-dirty take the whole thing apart and clean the crap out of it (caution – for real men only).

If you are like me, you are probably the “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” type of guy, especially considering the complexity of today’s internal combustion engines, and you probably also got a limited resoure of tools, time and sufficient space to become “Joe Mehanic” for an afternoon, or a day, or maybe even a week dependent upon how much you pay attention to what you are doing, how many parts you loose or get mixed up, and how far the chain of screwed up parts or broken bolts on the engine you encounter. I could give you many examples of that last situation but I am sure you have probably already “been there done that” too, and that’s why God created professional auto mechanics.

The simplest solution is to take your car to one of the local franchise auto parts stores, have them put it on the scanner and tell you exactly what’s going on with the air/fuel mixture, RPM, idle speed, etc, usually the resultant code printout will give you a decent enough game plan on how complex your fuel injection cleaning has to be, and usually I end up letting them sell me two bottles of the “dump in the tank” fuel injection cleaner, and I head out onto the highway (with radar detector in hand) and “open ‘er up” to let the magic juice do it’s thing.

I used to be real cool and opt for the take the fuel line off and insert the injection type cleaning solution, which usually took about 15 minutes to accomplish, but it seems that in this day and age, the parts stores are not selling these kits anymore, probably because the number of guys that blew themselves up made the corporate lawyers go berserk, so these type of systems are only available to professionals or online, and I preface them with a word of caution. DON’T DO IT. I don’t want to be responsible for you not having any eyebrows for four months, OK big guy?

The last, more complex option is for the real hardcore do it yourselfers. Get out the trusty repair manual or go to your favorite DIY (Do It Yourself) automotive website, take the injection manifold completely off the engine, put it on the workbench, soak it and scrub it with all kinda wierd shaped pipe cleaners and brushes and nasty smelling solvents, put it all back together, and be happy all that expensive gasoline is getting to where it is supposed to be getting and getting there nice and clean (and burning a bigger hole in your wallet right?).

Whichever is your method of choice, it is a very important milestone of regular vehicle maintenance, and if overlooked can lead to other more serious “out of spec” problems, so it should not be forgotten or put off too long.