Neil from Messick’s, here to give you six different preventative measures that you can take on your tier four emissions compliant tractor to avoid having unnecessary problems. There's no doubt if you hop on the internet and read message boards and stuff for equipment, you'll find a lot of guys running into problems with emission systems. By large, from the dealership perspective, we have had problems with this stuff, but it has not been overwhelming problems. 

By and large when most of our equipment goes to work, it's operated in such a fashion that these systems tend to work pretty well. That said, if you operate a modern piece of equipment with the same philosophies that you do for a 30-year-old piece of equipment, you very well could work yourself into a situation where you're making your emission system work harder than what it really needs to. By following a couple of these tips, you could operate your machine in such a way that your emission system is working more efficiently, and it isn't apt to run into as many problems. 

The very first thing that you want to keep in mind, and the most important thing that you can remember, is that these systems work the best when they're hot. They don't like to be run slow, and so your diesel particulate filter is where that really comes into play. That's the big silver canister you're going to see sitting on the outside of the engine, and whether it's a style called the DPF or a style called a DOC, a diesel oxidation catalyst, they work very much the same way. 

They're going to sit on the backside of the engine and treat the soot that's coming out of the engine to clean that up so it's not released out into the atmosphere. The burning process that takes place inside of that canister can be one of two types, either active regen where the machine goes into a regen loop and puts a little bit of diesel fuel into the canister, starts a fire on the inside in order to burn it out, or passive regeneration where the machine is operating hot and hard enough that there's adequate temperatures inside of that canister in order to naturally burn the soot off. 

That's how the DOC version of that tends to work. Both of those styles though, they want that heat, so you definitely want to take your machine and run it with sufficient revs, that you've got a good hot exhaust temperature going out to make sure the DPF is burning off. Most of your machines are going to have a gauge up on the dash that shows how plugged up the DPF is, and giving you an estimate of when it's going to need to burn. 

You can actually see, if you [unintelligible 00:02:27] your machine around for a little while and that gauge starts to creep up, if you throw some revs at it and get it really good and hot, you can actually watch the DPF gauge as it climbed down, and go the opposite direction without going into a region as that natural heat cycle helps burn off that soot. Bottom line, we need heat. The first pushback we will always get when we tell guys to run with more revs, is that they don't want to do that because of a perceived increase in fuel usage. 

In an older tractor, that would have been true. When you had a mechanically operated fuel pump, that fuel pump is going to deliver fuel based on your engine RPMs as they go up, but today's machines with electronic high pressure fuel injection do not work that way. They're going to deliver fuel based upon the needed torque load of the engine. You're just talking about revs and getting the engine up to speed. It takes very little fuel just to spin the cylinders. 

You're not going to go and have say insane fuel use by cranking your revs up just a little bit higher. When you bring a machine, say, up to some operating temperature, you come at the operating temperature for your engine, you're also working your hydraulic system appropriately. You're getting your flows moving, your pressures up, your machine is just going to run better. There's very, very few use cases I can think of, where you actually do want to idle the machine while you're working it. 

Again, bring those revs up. If you run your machine to a point that it needs to go into an active regen, for most pieces of equipment this is going to be about every 20 to 50 hours or so, where the soot has built up in the canister and it needs to be burned off. When you go into that active regen process, the machine is going to consume more air through the air filter and more fuel through the fuel filter than what it typically does during operations. 

If you notice that your machine is not completing the burn process, you want to go back and make sure you're keeping all of your filters necessarily clean in order to allow that additional air and fuel in order to flow through the system. That can create a choke point that during normal operations you may not realize. Going back again, regular periodic maintenance of those two systems is really going to be important to make your machine operate well. We've got back here, our scary blue cap, that's DEF fluid. 

Now if you're not familiar with what DEF fluid does, it's used to treat the nitrous oxides and stuff that are coming out of your exhaust and scrub it further. It's required on any machine in excess of 75 horsepower. There's several concerns that we have with DEF when it comes to its quality. It's not something that you just simply dump in there and top it off when it runs low, you actually need to be attuned to the quality of the fluids. 

It needs to be, for one, very, very clean. A few drops, literal drops of diesel fuel that makes it into your DEF tank, is enough in order to ruin some of the sensors that are the inside of the tank. There's sensors in there monitoring the quality of the DEF in order to make sure it's going to treat that exhaust properly, and drops can ruin those sensors. You don't want to, say, even share a funnel between the diesel tank and the DEF tank, because that in and of itself right there can ruin the system. 

When it comes to the fluid itself, it does have a shelf life. If you read the bottles, most of them will say they can last up to about a year, but we'll tell you, if you have poor storage conditions, that fluid will break down if it gets really hot, it can last as little as three months before it will start to go bad and not flow through the system properly anymore. Keeping that stuff fresh is really important in order to keep the system working properly. 

A new filter that's on these machines that you may not have been used to seeing in the past, is the CCV filter, the closed crankcase filter. On the case of this SVL 95 here, it sits right up here on top of the engine. You'll see that there are actually change in check intervals for these CCV filters, and what they do is vent the crankcase out through that filter and actually clean that excess gas that may escape from the inside of the engine. 

The thing you got to be mindful of with these is that you do follow those maintenance procedures and actually check them. If you happen to have one of these things plug up, where for whatever reason there's enough stuff in that filter that it's not flowing properly, it will start to create back pressure inside of your engine, and can do all kinds of catastrophic things very, very quickly. Remembering to maintain this additional filter can really save you a lot of money. 

Along with your DEF quality being really important, the quality of your fuel is now much more important as well. That really is driven by the Common Rail Fuel system that's on a modern diesel engine. Common Rail has done a lot of good things for us. You're now using 30,000 PSI running through your fuel injectors, giving you a much more efficient burn inside of your engine. It has raised fuel economy quite significantly. 

The downside though of that 30,000 PSI running through that injector, means that now the quality of your fuel is much more important and you can do much more damage to the engine with say water in your fuel, or algae or the number of different contaminants that can come up inside a diesel fuel. A couple of ways that you can prevent that, if you have box storage tanks, very aggressively treating that fuel for algae or water and those kinds of things, is definitely going to be a plus. 

Grab those bottles of fuel treatment and absolutely use them. Make sure that fuel then continues into your engine and stays clean. When it comes to your fuel filters, having filters coming off of your box system is a plus. You'll see that on all the ones that we have here. Then the fuel filters on your machine are really important to keep an eye on as well. Now, generally we're looking for five micron fuel filters on the fuel system for your tractor. 

Where this becomes really sketchy is if you go to aftermarket fuel filters, you generally do not know what micron level they are. We're going to lean pretty hard on using an OEM fuel filter for that reason, because you know its filtering properties are going to be correct for your engine. In our shop, we will sit and tell you there is a NAPA cross-reference for a Kubota fuel filter, that has cost tens of thousands of dollars in blown engines, because it does not cross reference properly. 

Make sure if you are crossing your filters that you know what micron level you're getting, and not simply matching up the threads. In summary, engines have come a long way in the last 15 years or so, we're burning a lot less fuel and we have much cleaner exhaust than we did from older engines. Obviously, there's come a lot of complexity with that. While these systems have not been trouble-free, there's definitely a very significant subset of problems that we have seen with this stuff that are absolutely preventable. 

Take a little bit of responsibility as the operator of the machine, run it the way that it's designed to be run, maintain it properly, and it's going to last a lot longer for you and give you far fewer problems than if you just sit on there, crank the key and go to work. Just take that couple of minutes to think through and care for your machine. If you have problems that we can help you with, parts or service needs, or machines that you're shopping for, give us a call at Messick’s, we’re available at (800) 222-3373, or online at messicks.com.