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Leaking EGR cooler

6K views 9 replies 5 participants last post by  Will Lloyd 
#1 ·
Hello Everyone, new subscriber to this site but have browsed the threads many times before, a great knowledge base.
OK, so, I have a '06 6.0 with a mild SCT towing tune and a flo-pro 4" exhaust, other than that shes bone stock. Just finished a big haul (about 8 Hours with 12k lbs)
and had 2 strange coolant temp spikes on the climbs, spiked from normal to almost max and then immediatly went back down to normal the moment a lifted throttle just a touch. This made me curious and I started to look into a few things, over the whole trip I had lost probably 2 pints of coolant and over the past 2 weeks of normal driving ive lost maybe another pint. so I removed EGR, Cleaned it, and checked for moisture in EGR cooler.
The valve was slightly gooey but not super bad, and the bottom of EGR cooler was somewhat damp, not dry and sooty.
this leads me to believe my EGR cooler is leaking but im not getting very much smoke at all and when it does smoke white its only when its cold and parked with the nose uphill.
So, I know I need to install a delete kit or get it welded it up, but im not super duper diesel mechanic and am going to need to pay the diesel shop to do it.
Will there be major repercussions from driving it knowing its leaking but making sure coolant stays topped up until I can afford to fix it???
Sorry for the long winded question but I wanted to get the story as accurate as possible.
Many thanks!
 
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#2 ·
First you have to understand why the egr cooler ruptured. This is usually caused by the oil cooler being clogged? The gauge on the dash does absolutely nothing. If it pegged at max, that's no good and was way too late. You really need a monitor to be able to tell what your exact temps are. If your oil is more than 15 degrees higher than coolant temp, oil cooler is clogged. What this does for the egr cooler is restrict coolant flow to it. Meaning you have hot exhaust gases coming in and not enough coolant to cool it down because it's getting clogged up in the oil cooler. These hot exhaust gases will hear the egr cooler up so much that it ruptures causing coolant to leak into your cylinders. Incompressible liquid along with higher cylinder pressures from the steam will stretch out your stock head bolts. Once this happens head gaskets blow. So to answer your question, continuing to drive with it like that is playing Russian roulette with your head gaskets and you're running out of blank spots. If you can get the egr cooler out, you're already right there to do the oil cooler as well. You should probably put it back together and research how to flush the system including back flushing it to prevent the new one from clogging
 
#3 ·
Thank you, that's pretty much the answer I expected, will be purchasing a monitor and delete kit and will have them inspect oil cooler when the egr cooler is removed. One thing I forgot to mention is I forgot to plug the egr back in after I cleaned it and started the truck:flushed: So I got a CEL, shut it off, plugged it back in and still have a CEL do I need to take it to a mechanic to have the CEL cleared?
 
#6 ·
Depends how much you're willing to spend. There's anything from android device+Bluetooth obd dongle+torque pro app, scangauge 2, edge insight
 
#8 ·
For Torque pro most use a Bluetooth OBDII you can buy a cheap one that works well enough or a nicer one that works better.
 
#9 ·
The connection from the Android device to the OBD port is bluetooth. You can get inexpensive ones - $10 - on eBay (search "ELM327") or more expensive ones - $60 - like the one listed in my sig. Any old phone or tablet will work within basic speed and screen size constraints. The Torque Pro app is $5 on the Google Play store.

You can see in this thread what monitoring like this might look like:
http://www.powerstroke.org/forum/6-...id-music-monitoring-backup-camera-system.html
 
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