Diesel fuel additives??

powderman426 wrote:

John & Angela wrote:
We use cetane booster in the smart cars as they are european diesels and built for a higher quality fuel. The cars run considerably quieter. A 10 dollar bottle lasts us about a year or so. (Its only a 5 gallon tank. Hard to tell with the mileage as our driving conditions change so much. We occasionally use Howes in the coach when we know it will be sitting for awhile.

I can't say that this still applies, but many years ago I bought an MG and it started running badly. When I took it to the mechanic, he asked what I was using in it. I said premium fuel as that is what the owners manual said to use. He said they have such crappy fuel over there that by using the premium I was burning the valves up. Used the lowest grade I could find and it worked fine. So I would check to see if you are wasting money, or doing harm. As for the diesel, when I bought mine about three years ago I put a couple bottles of Diesel Kleen in it over the first few months. Never saw any improvement and I still have a half bottle left. I am at 177,000 miles now and all seems well. I hope I didn't just jinx myself.

Thanks for the info. Mercedes quietly recommends a cetane booster for the US diesel users. Not a must have but a nice to have. Most of us with the CDI diesels tend to have less problems with the cetane booster. We use diesel clean. 10 bucks a year is cheap piece of mind. :). Keep in mind these things get 60 to 70 mpg so it's not like they need a lot of additive. :)