Poor heater performance on TDi - FIX found ..

[s.stirley]

Anyone owning one will know what I mean .. the 'standard' heater is a little crappy to say the least, taking forver to give any heat - despite the engine showing warm quite quickly. The reason seems to be because the heater and EGR valve are in parallel and the EGR being lower gets all of the flow.

It absolutely cooks now :) spent an hour last night re-plumbing the heater pipes, and this morning I was getting heat from stone cold (ice on the screen !) in around 3 minutes. Most of that hour was spent making two 'plugs' from 15mm copper pipes too, I didn't have the end-caps that I though I did so had to get inventive and fold and solder a couple.

Pictures of the pipes as they are below.

Basically I have moved the pipes so that rather than the EGR and heater being in parallel they are now in series. The water flows into the EGR valve, out of that on a new hose I have installed and to the top pipe of the heater, then out of that and return via the normal pipe. I used a foot of 16mm heater hose, two jubilee clips and two 15mm copper pipes made into stoppers. Actual pipe-work should take you around 15 minutes !

So, if you have a TDi I would definately invest in 50p's worth of new heater hose and get toasty warm like me :) the screen stayed clear the whole way in too <g>

Cheers, Simon.

--
'98 XEDi scratched, dirty and broken - but hot as hell in there !

[s.stirley]

'nother pic

[woodywoodpecker]

'nother pic


Hi as anyone done this fix on the heater as i have looked at the picture and can't workout if the new hose goes to the top heater outlet pipe or the bottom one, if its the top one do you lose the bleed valve by putting your new hose on there instead. if anyones as done this please mail me or post your reply thanks. :confused:

[TEMPL4R]

If you look closely, the new pipe goes under the pipe with the bleed and connects to the lower heater connection. The old pipe has a copper plug in both ends to seal it.

Chris

[willo]

Not for the TDi but for the Td4 that I have I found out something last week (after 7 years of ownership ). As the only two complaints I had about the FL, namely the aircon and the heater, I tried to do something about and during the summer I found out that the position of the airflow is not supposed to be on the position footwell/front opening but only on the front opening, having the 2 middle orientable openings and the two outside ones get all the cold air, that way the aircon worked very well. As for the heating, I used to put that airflow position also on the same footwell/front opening position which gave crap heating so now doing the same as for the aircon and all the hot air coming out of the 4 ventilation openings in front of the driver/passenger and the result is remarkable. Full heating after a couple of kilometers where before I could drive for 20 kilometers with almost no result. Amazing.