FinallyFiona
Admin Team
As you may be aware, I'm currently selling my Cobalt TDI and one thing that's come up as a question from an interested party is, do I know what might be causing it to start on two cylinders from cold? I've mentioned in the advert that I'd floated the subject past Marcus at WOM and he mentioned injector seals as a possibility. In the interest of complete openness, we agreed that I would start this thread to see if the collective wisdom of the forum can come up with any other diagnosis or confirm Marcus' thoughts.
The symptoms are that it's definitely temperature dependent, but not to the extent where glowplugs are involved. In the middle of summer at 25°C plus, it'll fire straight up on all three. On an icy winter's morning, it may take 20-30 seconds for the third pot to wake up. Today at 17°C having not been started since Saturday, it took about 5 seconds, on Saturday at about 13°C also after two days unstarted it was closer to 10 seconds. In my experience 5-10 seconds has been the typical behaviour. It hasn't got any worse that I have noticed in the 18 months I've had the car, and it's never failed to start, almost always firing up on the first try.
Once the third cylinder has chimed in the engine smooths out within a few seconds and runs evenly, without any further misfires. My feeling (although happy to be proved wrong!) is that we can discount the injector loom, which would tend to cause a misfire to come and go depending on the state of the connection in the broken wire(s).
Gentlemen (and ladies ) your thoughts please?
The symptoms are that it's definitely temperature dependent, but not to the extent where glowplugs are involved. In the middle of summer at 25°C plus, it'll fire straight up on all three. On an icy winter's morning, it may take 20-30 seconds for the third pot to wake up. Today at 17°C having not been started since Saturday, it took about 5 seconds, on Saturday at about 13°C also after two days unstarted it was closer to 10 seconds. In my experience 5-10 seconds has been the typical behaviour. It hasn't got any worse that I have noticed in the 18 months I've had the car, and it's never failed to start, almost always firing up on the first try.
Once the third cylinder has chimed in the engine smooths out within a few seconds and runs evenly, without any further misfires. My feeling (although happy to be proved wrong!) is that we can discount the injector loom, which would tend to cause a misfire to come and go depending on the state of the connection in the broken wire(s).
Gentlemen (and ladies ) your thoughts please?
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