Warning Light/Code Question: Gen 2

i would go to luscious, dealers tend to lie

 

I can't think of even the faintest reason Ms. Coquillette and her crew would be any less able than a dealer to make diagnostic sense of your trouble codes. The key is having access to the Toyota technical info, having access to the Techstream software for interrogating the car, and having good diagnostic chops. I'm pretty sure they've got all those boxes checked.

 

Welcome to PriusChat!!

How many miles on the vehicle, and how has the oil maintenance been? (change schedule, oil type, oil weight, burns oil or ran low before)

What were the few minor adjustments made?

What sort of performance issues did you briefly notice?

You may be able to do this yourself with some basic tools. Here is the step by step workup for the DTC P0011 :

https://share.qclt.com/%E4%B8%B0%E7%94%B0%E6%99%AE%E7%91%9E%E6%96%AF%E5%8E%9F%E5%8E%82%E8%8B%B1%E6%96%87%E6%89%8B%E5%86%8CPDF%E6%A0%BC%E5%BC%8F/Prius%20Service%20Manuals%202004/%E4%BF%AE%E7%90%86%E6%89%8B%E5%86%8C/04pruisr/05/2054m/cip0011.pdf

Easiest/cheapest is to inspect/clean/replace the tiny oil filter for the VVT solenoid, if no luck then try testing/cleaning/replacing the solenoid.

Not mentioned above, but the VVT solenoid = Oil Control Valve.

There is (or was) one dealer in the bay area that didn't charge for diagnostics/estimates (there could be others), message me for details.

FYI : you're moderated until you've posted 5 times.

 

You mean all the dealerships that charge a fortune to replace a Gen3 headgasket actually know the EGR system is the problem and have the "diagnostic chops" to do preventative EGR maintenance, rather than make more money replacing headgaskets and ignoring EGR system? Lol, you sure are optimistic about incompetent Toyota Stealerships today?

 

Heck, I don't "know the EGR system is the problem", and I can't say I've encountered anyone who does.

 

1) Clearly you know that clogged EGR's that aren't regularly maintained can contribute to a blown head gasket?
2) Clearly you know that Toyota Stealerships don't have EGR cleaning in recommended regular maintenance schedule?

at 150k miles the egr valve cooler assembly should be cleaned | PriusChat

 

Clearly I do not know that.

I know that there's a certain population of PriusChat members who seem to think that they know that, which doesn't make them not-nice people, but does reduce the degree to which I would rely on their diagnostic advice.

Anyway, I still can't quite tell whether you noticed my message in #3 was favoring Luscious.

 

Have you ever once attributed a blown headgasket in a Prius with a clogged EGR to some other cause? Seems if you think you have the "diagnostic chops" you'd articulate a technical explanation rather than trollish dismissiveness?

You're basically implying that a clogged EGR valve in early model Gen3 Prius has nothing to do with blown head gaskets and despite many hundreds of comments on PriusChat pointing to this direct cause and effect everyone on here is wrong and you're right despite you offering no proof/reference to a link to make your argument more clear because you simply don't care about being wrong because you convinced yourself everyone is wrong but you?

 

Hard to tell where you're even getting the ideas you're putting in my mouth here.

While I do not know that EGR is a common or likely cause of head gasket issues, I have also never once claimed to know that it isn't. I've actively participated in the threads most likely to contribute to learning whether it is or not. I started the collection of actual EGR blockage data in May 2019, which was carried over to a dedicated thread by jas2908 two days later, and on which many PriusChat members have participated in the last three years.

I've done more than my share of helping to sort out all of the different purported explanations of the claimed connection and ranking the plausibility of each. For example, differential blockage in the manifold passages: relatively more plausible, because the ECM can't detect that; overall upstream blockage, relatively less plausible, because you can see that in monitor test results, and the ECM can compensate. You'll find plenty of posts of mine where I have given advice to check those manifold passages, because that connection seems plausible enough to justify that relatively small effort. What you don't find is me saying I "know" it.

I've been reading PriusChat for 14 years and if there have been comments posted establishing a direct cause and effect between EGR and head gasket failure, I have somehow missed all of them, and it's not for lack of looking. To be clear, that would need to be more than a thread where somebody's head gasket fails and the thread gets piled onto by members saying it happened because of their EGR. That's what we used to call begging the question. Multiplying that by many hundreds of posts is a good way to establish an echo chamber. It is not a good way to establish cause and effect.

The closest thing I've seen is one thread where somebody had two or three gasket replacements in a row. I think Mendel has that link. It is certainly not a bad contribution to the evidence for the idea, and to this day it still seems to be the best piece out there. At the same time, it's kind of incompletely documented, there are plenty of details (some obscured by the car changing hands mid-story) it would be helpful to have, and I don't think many people used to experimental work would see it as the mic-dropping smoking gun that Mendel sometimes describes it as.

I don't know about you, but for me, there are things that I know, and things that I know to be false, and in between those things there is a lot of stuff with different degrees of plausibility.

There is some plausibility to the idea that your manifold EGR passages are worth a quick check, and that doing so might reduce a head gasket risk by some unknown amount, and be worth doing because of the relatively small amount of labor.

There is some, but less, plausibility to a connection between upstream EGR clogging and possible head gasket risk, enough to make an easy argument for keeping an eye on the EGR flow test results, and possibly using those as a guide to more labor-intensive cleaning. This could be somewhere around, I don't know, more plausible than "COVID was lab-engineered" and less plausible than "omicron gives milder disease".

None of that comes to the level of "know".

When you're judging a person's trustworthiness, there are really two ingredients there. The glaring one is honesty; you can't very well trust somebody who'll flat out say stuff they know is wrong. But you can also have somebody who is personally as honest as the day is long, would never deceive you on purpose, but whose words still end up having to be taken all the time with a grain of salt, just because the person is nowhere near careful enough about what they'll say they "know".

You might not want to be that guy.

 

The point is regular maintenance of EGR is something DIY folks do to prevent head gasket failures, but many stealerships and possibly even you, don't see the value of doing regular EGR maintenance/cleaning. As for everything else you wrote above, hopefully people don't waste their time.

 

Pure conspiracy theory logic. They will change out an egr system for $800-$1000 if you ask them to do it. They will recommend it if you are getting an egr code. Most of the time, they do NOT want to do a head gasket job on a early gen3 because they know a rebuilt engine will last years longer while the head gasket job alone often fails quickly.

It is interesting that dealer mechanics, pro auto mechanics and most of the advice outside of Priuschat see no correlation between a clogged egr and head gasket failures. It is recognized that gen3s with flawed piston rings and flawed egr designs have plenty of problems in both areas.

 

It's something some DIY folks do, especially if they came to PriusChat and read a whole bunch of posts from people claiming to know it would prevent head gasket failures, so of course they do it and think that they are doing it to prevent head gasket failures.

It might be worthwhile to find out whether it really is connected to head gasket failures, and that wouldn't be impossible to find out, but the level of interest in finding out seems to be absolute lowest among the chief proponents of the idea.

Encouragingly, the level of particicpation on the thread for EGR flow data collection shows there are still people around who recognize that coming up with a plausible story for why something might be true is only the first step to finding out if it is or not.

 

What has this Gen 3 problem got to do with this particular Get 2 problem, and why are you hijacking this poster's thread with off topic chatter?

Ten posts (so far) of irrelevant information cluttering this poster's thread.