Terraclean Service

[Estoril X5 D Sport]

Hi all thought I would post a thread that may prove helpful to some of you.

At work we took back a Mini Cooper S in a P/X and normally we just put them to auction as anything with a Mini badge is just a bottomless pit of money to recondition to get ready for sale but this was a nice one with a great spec and history but it suffered the usual R53/R56 complaints, IE running like a bag of cac, it doesn't matter if its the normally aspirated 1.6 or supercharged S they all suffer from the worst carbonisation of anything on the road, IE running rough, flat spots, bogging down at junctions, kangaroo petrol and an ECU full of fault codes. The cure is to get the head off and a full decoke, throw away the inlet manifold and replace with a new one, but Minis have a limited profit margin and its just not cost effective for us to do but this one was to good to auction so I decided to try some of the new tech that's come to the fore recently.

Mini dealers now will do a decoke using eggshells so I thought I would give the local robber a phone and get a price but at £650 it wasn't viable for us to consider but whilst on an American tuning forum I saw lots of threads regarding Terraclean and all that I read was very positive, but having seen so many crap addatives and so called miracle fixes over the years I wasn't convinced. I went on youtube to find out more info and found Edd China off Wheeler Dealers doing a Teraclean service on an old XK Jaguar and he seemed sold on it so thought that's good enough for me, found the UK website for the product put in my postcode and found that my local service agent was just 10 miles away, gave the guy a call and made a booking.

The service took around an hour and cost £128 inc Vat, I watched it all happen and it was all very professional, he was more than happy to answer any question I asked, he showed me the machines required to do the servicing (one for petrol engines and one for diesels) he showed me the products used in the process, I think he could tell I was still not quite convinced but he was smugly confident I could tell.

Ok now for the run home and straight away I could tell this is a vast improvement from the journey up and crawling out of the city the car had lost the staggering and jerking it had on the way up, it sounded smooth with no misfire from the exhaust and it was certainly way more pleasant to drive at slow speed but once on the dual carriageway I was really gob smacked, it pulled like a train, no hint of a flat spot under full throttle, slowed it down to 50mph in 6th gear and gave it full throttle and it was smooth and pulled well until the revs got up and it started to fly, and if any of you know about a coked up Mini then you know they just cant do that, so in short it worked a treat at a fraction of the cost of a decoke.

I have booked my X5 in for next week, not because its got a fault but as a preventive caution, its a 9 year old diesel with 67k so I will see if I notice a difference and let you know but a word of CAUTION to all, if your car has a running fault then research your FAULT CODES, if your EGR or DPF is blocked then its already to far gone, if your car has a broken piston ring, shagged turbo or screwed injectors this is no cure, it is a SPRING CLEAN for the injectors all things combustion, EGR valves DPF filters CATs exhaust etc so do your research first to see if you may be wasting money on something that wont be of benefit to your particular problem.

Regards

Stephen

[btmaldon]

Nice write up and certainly worth concidering