We get so many questions and so many confused people. The first time they see the icons pop up on their dash. My tractor wants to do a regen right now. So I'm going to show you exactly what it looks like. Now, currently take a look down here at my dash. Now, you see this light right here. This is telling you, it wants to regen. This is telling you the revs are too low. So if we take this and start speeding this up, you see my light turns out. That means my revs are high enough, but I'm not hot enough yet. Now at this point, I'm going to go back to work, right? It's not actually going to start the regen process until the easy bake oven is hot enough in order to start to burn that soot, I'm going to keep my eye on the light down here, and eventually that light's going to stop blinking. And that's going to tell you that the tractor has now started the regen process.
Now, there is a point here that you've got other buttons that are involved in this system that might be of use to you. One of them is called the regen inhibit button. That's how your owner's manual calls it out. Inhibit is just a fancy way of saying don't do this now. Right? If I were headed back into my garage and I was going to park my tractor and I knew I was going to be shutting the tractor off. I don't want that regen process to start because I'm going to have to interrupt it when I shut the machine off. And my easy bake oven has got hot for no reason, right? There's no point in heating it up and starting the process and it's not going to finish. That's the point that you could potentially reach down and press that inhibit button.
You could make a really good case that these buttons cause more confusion than what their function really actually is. There's not a whole lot of reason to want to do that. If I look down here and see, my light's still blinking. I'm still not hot enough. Right down here is my inhibit button that I can turn on and that would actually stop the tractor now from starting the regen process. So I have my light blinking. That's telling me it needs to be done. If I don't want it to do it, I press that to hit inhibit. So that light on it's never going to start the regen process. So that's not a big deal.
You could do that for a half an hour if you need to. Or if you're finishing up a job, you're going to take your tractor back and park it, whatever. And you don't want the process to start. But in my case, I'm going to let it go. So I've raised those revs up. I'm waiting for it to get hot. I haven't been running here very long, so it might take it a little bit of time to get up the temperature. But once it does, my light's going to turn solid. It's going to burn. So in the meantime here, I'm going to continue working.
All right, so you notice here that my light's now solid. I only stepped away from the tractor here for about two minutes but that heated right back up again. And now it's off and going. So now at this point, the burn cycle has started. Now would be the time that you would ideally not turn your tractor off. You'd like this cycle to finish. If you have to, you're not going to ruin anything. The next time you start your machine, it's going to want to start back up again. But right now it's burning.
Now, the thing that you don't want to do now is slow your revs down. You need to continue to have that heat. So the RPMs need to stay up. So your engine continues running hot. Internally, your engine is letting a little bit of fuel go by on the exhaust stroke in order to run that burn cycle inside the easy bake oven. When this is burning, I could actually sit here and smell it a little bit. It does create a little bit of exhaust odor, you call it. It's not a big deal. It's not obtrusive or disgusting or anything, but you could definitely tell that it's happening. So here it goes.
We are doing a regen. And I'll tell you here about how long it takes to complete. You'll notice that I'm at 51 hours on my tractor right now. This is the third regen that I've done. So that puts me right about 16- 17 hours per regen. That's on the higher side for a tractor like this. Typical is closer to 20 to 30. However, I only do loader work with my tractor. The hotter your work is the less often you're going to regen. So I'm about the worst case scenario for people with a tractor usage when it comes to regen. I do a lot of loader work down around lower RPMs. And so for that reason, I'm going to regen a little bit more often than most people will. But for my basically 100% loader work type tractor, 16-17 hours between every regen. And here we go! We're still working with regen on. No issues, no power loss, no nothing, really.
In fact, I even dropped the revs down about 10% just to take some of the noise away. So the engine's not screaming. Oh, it finished. I think that took maybe 15 minutes. So that was it. That was as dramatic as the regen process can be. We get a lot of phone calls from people to see those lights come on and just don't know exactly what to do the very first time they see them. So if you see that one on there with the arrow blinking, with the up arrow, that's telling you to raise your engine RPM so that you get that staying hot enough to burn. The Blinky poof light will go solid as soon as the thing starts to go through the burn cycle. Give it 15, 20 minutes or so. Continue doing your work. At that point, do things going to finish and you go about your day.
You won't see it for another interval, right? In my case, probably about another 20 hours or so. That easy. Remember you do have those two buttons there on your dash that will do other things. The inhibit button, just delays the start of the burn process. The other one is a parked regen button, which really, you should never have to use unless you bypass things too many times. It's a way to park the tractor in your driveway and force it to go through a little bit deeper level of clean than what this usually does. So that easy.
This is a DEF header, and this part is responsible for a lot of headaches in our shops throughout the last number of years. I'm going to show you here how a DEF header works, how the manufacturers have improved the construction of these things over the years. Hopefully we could take a little bit of education here today and prevent you from having trouble with your DEF equipped equipment. Now, while this thing looks pretty complicated, when you start breaking down its function there's actually a lot of simple parts here that you can understand within this one large assembly. This coil that comes down here through the yellow and the gray caps is a heating element.
You're going to have a pump and a heater up here that pumps warm fluid down through this coil in order to warm DEF fluid up. It can freeze in the wintertime when it gets cold, and so this is going to help heat the tank up to keep the fluid flowing freely. The other lines here are going to dip down into the tank itself. There's one line right here that comes up to the quality sensor, that we'll talk about later, a vent line here in the top, and then an intake line to pull the DEF up, and then out into your exhaust system. This plug here at the top is for the quality sensor. That's this box that sits on top of the assembly right here. It measures that the DEF has the right proportions of the different ureas and waters inside of it that help it work properly. This silver pin right here that runs right down through the middle, if I flip this upside down you'll see there's a float on here. That is the level indicator for the float in your tank. This one assembly right here performs all of these functions. The heating, the dipping, the monitoring of quality, the measuring is all done by the DEF header.
