Boost MPGs by keeping fuel injectors clean

Speaker 1:

Fleet managers looking for ways to minimize fuel costs? Even small gains can lead to significant savings. Download our fuel savings strategy guide today for 80 actionable tips to boost your fleet's fuel economy. With trucking's operational costs hitting a new record high, one often overlooked maintenance item could help fleets save.

Jason Cannon:

Hey everybody. Welcome back. I'm Jason Cannon and my co-host is Matt Colton. The American Transportation Research Institute announced the last week that trucking's operational costs hit yet another record high in 2025 with repair and maintenance costs being one of the biggest reasons for that increase.

Matt Cole:

Fuel is one of fleet's biggest expenses, but what about the fuel system itself? Maintaining the fuel system and keeping injectors clean can be a difference maker for fleet's bottom line.

Garth Redifer:

The number one expense that these fleet operators have, and it's over the road, it's farmers in the field running equipment, it's construction accounts. If you're running a piece of diesel equipment, your number one expense is fuel. And what we've seen in the last say 90 days or so, fuel prices have spiked and they drop and then they go back up. We're in a very volatile cycle with fuel prices. And so it's an expense that is a significant cost to the fleet operators. Running on razor thin margins to begin with, they've got to really be managing that. So what we are looking at is explaining to them the things that they can do to help increase their fuel economy. And one thing is making sure your injection system is clean. And when we talk about that, the reason it's important is diesel engines with the heat and compression that they operate on as opposed to a smart plug as a gasoline engine has, we're looking at heat and compression, but you've got to atomize that fuel into the combustion chambers so that it can surround itself with oxygen and you can maximize the burn and so that fuel's getting injected into the combustion chamber in a fine mist, that allows it to burn all of that fuel or the majority of that fuel.

If it gets a stream into the combustion chamber, we can't atomize that fuel if it's in a stream pattern and blowing in. We need it to finally atomize and let oxygen work and help it combust. So these trucks that are going down the road, maybe, hey, they're high pressure common rail with a full emission system and there's still some smoke being generated. That's just the first sign of unburnt fuel and you're wasting dollar bills or going out the exhaust stack because black smoke coming out of the stack is unburnt fuel, plain and simple. And so what we do with our detergents, we go make sure that they go into the fuel. They clean deposits off the injectors and the injector tips to make sure that that injector is clean and clear, push the fuel in, atomize that fuel. Now the engine can do what it's designed to do from the manufacturer, whichever manufacturer it is.

They can burn that fuel at a 90 to 95%. 100% combustion rate in a diesel engines, highly unlikely. You're going to have some unburnt fuel just by nature. They're better than they ever have been as far as atomizing and burning that fuel that's in the combustion, but you're still going to have some unburnt fuel. So our goal is to get you as close to 100% as possible by making sure that injection system is clean and free of deposits.

Jason Cannon:

So how much of a difference does using additives to clean your injectors in the fuel system in general really make?

Garth Redifer:

We've had a product that we've been pushing since I've been here and so I think it came out in 04 or 02 timeframe, diesel clean plus setane boost. It's got a detergent package. It's got a setan improver and it's got a lubricator in it. And over continued use of time, meaning every time somebody fills up or every gallon of fuel coming out of their bulk storage tank is treated with this product. And it's designed to be used on a daily basis, continued use basis. And that makes sure that your injectors stay clean, the sea tane state is up so the combustion rate increases. The numbers that we see with that is say 6% or so better fuel economy with a diesel clean over a maintained use of time. What we've come out with recently this year was our diesel injector and DPF flush product. It's our gold bottle.

We've been making a very big push on social media through marketing efforts to get this product out there. And ideally what it's getting and the results that we've seen with that is taking customers that aren't very good about treating their fuel. They treat when they think about it or, "Hey, every month or every couple months I've dumped something in to clean up." With that product in those cases, we've seen class seven and eight trucks get upwards of 10% fuel economy improvements after a single use of that product. It's an immediate super concentrated detergent package that's going to make sure that all deposits are cleaned off the injectors in on tank fuel load. So customer can treat this fuel tank with this product, run it through and measure the results and they're going to see somewhere around a 10 or 13 I think is one of the tests that we saw results on there.

So a significant increase right away because it's taking inevitably a dirty injection system and immediately cleaning it. And then what we tell customers with that product in particular, use that product at a minimum once a month. In the time between using that product once a month, maintain that performance, maintain that cleanliness level with our diesel clean product. And so it's kind of like it's a deep clean with a flush product and then it's maintaining that cleanliness with diesel clean over that time period. So that's ideally what we're doing. A customer that said, "Hey, I've used diesel clean every tank and I never miss," their increase with flush is probably going to be a little bit less significant as of the 10%, but they're still going to see an increase of cleanliness just because of the deep, deep clean that it's going to do throughout the injection system.

Matt Cole:

As Garth mentioned, best practices for using power services diesel clean product is with every fuel up. With most OTR fleets, that duty would fall to the driver. Garth explained some ways fleets go about ensuring that their trucks are treated.

Garth Redifer:

We have some fleets say that, hey, they have bulk storage tanks at their terminal and they can control what's in those tanks. When those drivers fill up at their terminals, they can control that. But like you said, that's when they're at the terminal. But when they're out on the road going to travel centers across the country, now it's really kind of subjected to what fuel they're getting, where they're at. Are they going to send them on the road with additive that they want them to use or are they going to allow the drivers to go in and get what they want? And most fleets that have a successful program per se, they're able to send the drivers with the particular product that they want. Leets that right now are using diesel claim religiously. They'll send those drivers with a set amount of bottles of the diesel plane with them.

They make sure that they treat and there's kind of an incentive, "Hey, we've come back with the spent bottles or there's some tracking that they do, and everybody does a little bit different of how they're incentivizing their drivers how to do this. The beauty of with our diesel injector and DPF flush product is they're setting that up as a maintenance interval. So when that truck is designated to come in for an oil change or a fuel filter service that's set on a mileage program, that maintenance manager or the maintenance techs can dump that product straight into the tank when the truck's there getting a fuel filter change, for example, and they can send that down the road and they log that truck as it was changed at this date this miles and treated with diesel injector and DPF flush. And so they keep track as a maintenance level at the shop on that.

Jason Cannon:

Now, when your trucks are fueling out on the road, you never really know how good the quality of the fuel you're getting really is. Not to mention different parts of the country have different blends of diesel. Those factors are out of a fleet's control, so Garth says to control what you can with additives.

Garth Redifer:

Fuel quality is a big issue. Fuel quality is one of the big misunderstood items out there because people think diesel's diesel. Whether you're in Washington State on the West Coast or if you're in Texas or anywhere in between, people assume, well, diesel's diesel. Well, it's not. Each region has a variation. Regionally, statewide different spots have different diesel specifications. There's different levels of setane. There's different base chemical. Winterization cloud point numbers on diesel in Texas is much different than it is up in Minnesota during the winter months. So we're trying to explain, and it's one customer at a time. You got to take small bites of the apple. Yo' trying to educate these customers to say, "Hey, when you're traveling, if you're trucking from California to North Carolina, you're going to fill up, I don't know, six, seven times going across the country potentially, and you're going to run into six or seven different types of diesel fuel and different options." So emission systems being one that's very finicky, they might react differently to those different seven different diesel fuels that you're going to put into the piece of equipment.

And so that's where we look at the things that we can control is we can help with the product to no matter what diesel you're putting in there, we can one, make sure the injection system's staying clean. And then two, the testing that we've shown with this product with the injector and DPF flush is there's a cleaning effect of the DPF filters and it's significant. We're seeing NOX emissions reduced up to 50 to 70%. And so it is significant where we're reducing the emissions coming out. And when you're reducing emissions, it goes to tell you, well, one, I'm cleaning the injectors because it's atomizing and burning the fuel cleaner. It's two, it's cleaning up the DPF and a particulate that's getting caught in that. And so it's letting less out the exhaust stack on the equipment. So when we look at it, we're looking at, okay, we're cleaning up at the injectors.

Everything good starts at cleaning up the injectors because if we're burning, like we go back to when we talked about burning 90, 95% of the fuel that's in the combustion chamber, if we're burning that, there's not a lot going downstream that's going to get caught in the DPF filter. So these equipment operators are going to be able to go much further down the road before they see these regen cycles going on. And the ones that are happening, the active and passive while they're heading down the road, not a problem. If they get plugged up to a point where the truck's going to force a regen, well, now it's pulled over to the side of the road or sitting at a truck stop or somewhere burning that DPF filter off. Not only is it doing that, it's burning a lot of fuel while it's doing that and it's burning time.

And with these drivers, with maximizing the DOT regulation and getting as many hours and a miles down the road as they can possibly do within the regulations that are set, they need to be moving. They can't be sitting on the side of the road or at a truck stop for 45 minutes or an hour while this truck does a regen cycle.

Matt Cole:

Fleets with their own fuel tanks at terminals should also be making sure those tanks stay clean.

Garth Redifer:

We talk about the fuel that's in the tanks of the truck, the fuel that's going through the engine system on these trucks. We're talking about how to clean the injectors and clean the DPF filters and how to maintain that and maximize fuel economy and efficiencies. One of the things that gets overlooked is those fleets that are storing their own fuel on site. Say they've got a 10,000 gallon storage tank at their terminal. They need to be testing those. Our guys are out every day testing tanks for water and bacteria issues in those storage tanks. Contamination leads to a lot of problems within these tanks and it's water, it's bacteria, it leads to filter plugging, injector failures, fuel system failures because there's bacteria contamination in a lot of these storage tanks. Truck stops, travel centers throughout the country, they rely upon volume going through there to stay clean.

But volume doesn't clean the bottom of a storage tank. The heavy, the water contaminants, the bacteria contaminants, those fall to the bottom. And so we need to be pulling bottom samples. We need to be testing. We know drivers, we know fleets don't have the ability to go check the fuel every time they're stopping somewhere to get fuel to make sure it's clean and clear. That's our job. So if a fleet has tanks, fleet's interested in looking us up and having us come out and do a fuel analysis for us, they can reach out to us through our website, powerservice.com and get to us, get our regional managers that are in the area and they'll come out, pull a sample, show them and do an analysis of their tank and what they would need to do to clean it up if there is an issue. So it's one of the most kind of overlooked situations.

And I've told people for years, if you have 50 trucks, you've got a maintenance program for all 50 of those trucks. You have a maintenance schedule that you've set and deemed that, hey, my oil change interval, my fuel filter change intervals, you've got that. If you have a storage tank, that needs to be your 51st piece of equipment. That needs to be a maintenance program put in place on that tank because it's the lifeblood of your entire engine fleet and we need to be keeping an eye on those as well.

Jason Cannon:

That's it for this week's 10-44. You can read more on ccjdigital.com. While you're there, sign up for our newsletter and stay up to date on the latest in trucking industry news and trends. If you have any questions or feedback, please let us know in the comments below. Don't forget to subscribe and hit the bell for notifications so you can catch us again next week.