V70: Engine D5: Puff of blue smoke upon cold start with Video

[Kev0607]

Originally Posted by Daim

Did your car show the check engine light or were they hidden codes?

On my dad's V70, especially on cold mornings, it would rumble or shake for a few seconds on startup. There was no warning light on the dash, but when I hooked up diagnostics, it said there was a fault with cylinder 2 glow plug.

If you have diagnostics available, its worth checking. Some fault codes don't display warning messages, which sounds odd, but its true.

[bananarama]

Originally Posted by Daim

Did your car show the check engine light or were they hidden codes?

Nothing! Same as Kev0607 actually, rough-ish starts on cold mornings with no check engine light or anything. If I plugged the OBD reader I could see the glow-plug-related error-codes.

In case it helps I use Veepeak OBDCheck BLE+ along with the Car Scanner ELM OBD2 app on my phone. Ideally I should get VIDA...

[Daim]

Okay, cheers! I'll then see if I can get codes checked. Just to make sure...

[Daim]

Checked the plugs today, looks like the workshop didn't replace them, like charged. Great 'stealership'. I also had my exhaust off to replace it found pieces of the DPF in the pipe between the DPF and the rear axle. On top of that, parts of the DPF have broken out of the wafer. We'll, new DPF required then.

[Daim]

Okay guys, the results are in.

I first checked the glow plugs. My results were that two didn't work. So I was assuming, that the car had 2 dead glow plugs. Then again, I couldn't check the OBD so I couldn't see if the car had stored any issues/fault codes.

My next step was to replace the exhaust anyway. In this moment I found out, that the DPF had broken. That would explain the soot and black smoke out of the exhaust. The DPF had deiced to break into several pieces and the result was it didn't work - oddly the regeneration of the DPF was still triggered but it didn't ever tell me do do so.

As I needed a new DPF and wasn't prepared to do it myself, I went to Volvo and also told the tech expert (long long time in the Volvo trade) about the blue smoke upon coldstart and that I seem to have found dead glow plugs.

I picked the old bugger up half a day later and was told: the blue smoke thing is easily solved with an update, which was missing on my V70. Seems the previous owners didn't even bother getting updates. In the end, a new DPF was required - I knew that - and the glow plugs are all good. Cold starts are now totally smooth and it doesn't stink of unburnt fuel nor is there any blue smoke. He basically said it would probably just be an update thing... and seemingly was right.

So sometimes going to the experts from the brand is the best thing to do. Especially if they have all that experience of working on D5s.