It's one of our most frequently asked questions, and the honest answer is: it depends.
In most cases, experience tells us roughly how long a specific make and model will take, and we can give an estimate straight away. And most of the time, the customer gets their car back when promised.
For some vehicles, it's simple: lift it up, undo the bolts, clean the filter, bolt everything back — a couple of hours and done!
For others, it seems the engineers had a sense of humour and buried the DPF underneath every other component in the car. Some models require dismantling half the front suspension just to reach it. On the bright side, we get to inspect the running gear while we're at it — but the customer came in for a filter clean, after all!
So sometimes we have to be upfront from the start: your particular car was designed by a very creative engineering team, and two hours simply won't be enough.
Then there's the third scenario — the really entertaining one. That's when all external factors decide to work against you simultaneously.
A car comes in that looks like a quick, easy job. We cheerfully say: a couple of hours, no problem! Up it goes on the lift and… oh my.
You know that stuff they spread on the roads in winter from those big gritting machines? The chemical that makes the road surface ripple like cream soup in a hard frost? We don't know the exact formula, but it has a remarkable ability to eat through vehicles — especially the bolts and nuts that haven't been touched since the factory floor.
The upside: the customer gets brand new bolts and nuts. The downside: we have to call and explain that two hours isn't happening. How long exactly? Hard to say — we're hoping by end of day. It all comes down to how cooperative the bolts decide to be.
And then there are the severely blocked filters. These are rare — logically, a car in that condition shouldn't be able to move under its own power. Yet somehow, against all odds, they make it to us.
One car arrived with a filter so completely clogged that it initially pulled the cleaning machine's hoses into a vacuum — nothing was getting through at all. We got there eventually, but it took serious work: multiple rounds of soaking and flushing.
So yes — predicting exactly how long a DPF clean will take is sometimes truly like blowing soap bubbles!
