Fuel Injection Cleaning - Corolland: the Toyota Corolla Forums

Is fuel injection cleaning part of regular routine maintenance. When should you do it.

I have 92,000 on my corolla and never did it. Is it recommended to do it or only when you have a problem.

Should you use the kind that you pour in your gas tank like Tehran or is it better to get fuel injectors clean buy mechanic.

Frank

Nope - most fuel injection cleaning is either a dealership add-on or an aftermarket maintenance thing. Toyota doesn't have any specified scheduled maintenance for fuel injection cleaning. Cleaners that you add to the tank can help mild cases of dirty injectors from filling up at non-top tier gas stations (high tier gas stations have a minimum amount of additives that must be present in the gas). But even those ones, you have to find ones that have a decent amount of cleaning additives. Most are just simple solvents - won't clean the injectors at all.

Doesn't mean that is a bad idea - in some cases, this could solve some fuel delivery problems. Though most of the time, if the injectors get so fouled up that they need a fuel injection cleaning, you have other problems to deal with. The Corolla is one of those "if it ain't broke, don't mess with it" sort of vehicle. Shortening up routine fluid changes won't hurt - but some services, like this injector cleaning - harder to say.

Some like to run add-to-tank additives every couple of fill ups - some even report better operation, better fuel economy, more power. Personally - I'd only add it if I was diagnosing a possible fuel problem or if the car was running a bit off. As long as you fill from a reputable gas station that sees a good turn-over of gas (fresher gasoline) - then there really is no reason to run any additional additives in the fuel system. On something like an older carburated car or one that sits for extended periods of time (months to years), that could be a different story.

I've run Redline Fuel System Cleaner from time to time - one of the few additives that have lots of PEA cleaning additives (last time I checked it was 50%). Run on my 8th gen Corolla when it hit 200K miles - but didn't improve much of anything. Did seem to idle a bit better and gained a few MPG - but I was also pretty aggressive driving it as well, so some of those gains were also likely from blowing carbon from the plugs from the higher revs.

Fish

I always wanted to know what are the top tier gas stations. Meaning companies. I heard Sunoco and Shell had good gas but I do not know.

Just curious. In your opinion who has good gas.

Thanks Frank.

http://www.toptiergas.com/retailers.html

The trick is finding out who the actual distributors of the gas that gets to the retailer. I've seen a single tanker truck fill up the tanks at a BP, Shell, and Sunoco - as they were all next to each other. I personally don't have a particular favorite gas for all the cars, but i have found that each one tends to favor one type of station/brand of gasoline over another.

My old 2003 Matrix XRS only gets BP gas, but surprisingly, it runs poorly in the new 2009 Matrix XRS. My 2009 RAV4 tends to favor Shell gasoline over the others. The Corolla - runs on just about anything, doesn't seem to mind one way or another.

Station gasoline quality seems to very wildly over time as well - used to fill up at a 7Eleven close to home - ran the best out of all the stations around me, found out later that it was serviced by a top tier distributor, but didn't specific which one. After a couple of years - quality tanked and actually caused my Matrix to stall and not run - water in gasoline. Had to have the tank drained and fuel system flushed out, plugs and oil changed out - on 7Eleven's nickel, Never been back since.