Building a campervan and sharing the love
Not entirely Sprinter related but again I’ve fitted one of these diesel air heaters to our van (kindly donated by a friend) so I’ve added the manuals including the service manual online here. it’s a great air heater for the money, reliable and easy to service.
Ours is currently mounted to the top of one of the rear wheel arches with the exhausts emerging in the when arch at the rear of the vehicle.
So there we were today driving home in our Sprinter when the EDC light came on, we had a blip/cough and then loss power. Engine would restart and then simply die if you touched the throttle.
I managed to coax her into a lay by and safely park up.
Thankfully I was carrying our handy MaxiDiag Elite diagnostic unit (buy one if you don’t have one) which showed up a series of “excess current on common cable” errors on the injectors.
I had read about this error before and have heard of the engine loom chaffing on the mount points. Sure enough, a quick check of the loom running to the top of the block showed up a suspicious mount just to the left of the battery and underneath the loom had worn through and was touching the mount.
With this taped up with some PVC tape and then secured with a zip tie to prevent further chaffing the problem and error codes were instantly gone and we made our way home. If you fancy some preventative maintenance I highly recommend cutting the factory zip ties on these areas where the harness is attached to metal brackets, padding them with some cut down rubber strip then reattaching the cable with some new zip ties.
So from this we learnt, know your engine, read and absorb the content on Sprinter Source and always carry tools and a decent diagnostic tool!