On my old Td4 Freelander the EGR was easy to disable. All you did was remove the vacuum activation tube from the crankcase to the EGR and stick a screw in it to seal it. The crankcase end stayed open, but some people did put a bottle trap on the end of it.

I wonder if it is just as simple on the Yeti.

On my old Td4 Freelander the EGR was easy to disable. All you did was remove the vacuum activation tube from the crankcase to the EGR and stick a screw in it to seal it. The crankcase end stayed open, but some people did put a bottle trap on the end of it.

I wonder if it is just as simple on the Yeti.

Sadly those days are gone.

You used to be able to do it on the earlier VAG PD engines - I did exactly the same, pulled the vac hose off, stuck something up it to block it, and reattached so it all looked normal.

But on the later PD engines it would trigger a fault, I think because the airflow recorded by the MAF was higher than expected. And that was about 10 years ago

Is it still a big job to block off the egr and get it taken out of the ecu. What difference will it make to performance and emissions for the MOT

If the EGR routes through the cylinder head like on my CR170, it's dead easy to blank off.

Really easy and you can do it in less than 10 mins if you've got the right size Torx bit.

 

You can get a blanking plate like this one, and fit here:

 

 

As the holes in the plate and gasket are slotted, you don't even have to fully remove the screws, just slacken them a bit, drop the plate and gaskets in, and retighten.

 

So the hardware side of it will cost you less than a tenner.

 

Then you'd need to get a company to map out the EGR, there's lots of places online if you have a search. I doubt it would cost that much, certainly a lot less than a days labour and parts to replace an EGR assy that's for sure!

 

No difference to performance or MOT.

 

Downside could be a slightly longer warmup, as with the EGR operating, you get hot exhaust gas being recirculated into the inlet, and also the heat from the exhaust gas transfers to the coolant as it passes through the EGR cooler. 

In reality I've no idea how much difference it would make, not much I expect.

Edited 10 January, 201610 yr by muddyboots

Then you'd need to get a company to map out the EGR, there's lots of places online if you have a search.

 

 I'm not an expert on these things but our 2012 common rail motor has the newer Bosch ECU's that are not easily flashed through the diagnostics port with 3rd party kit and usually require the ECU off the car and opened up to remap. Remap by post seems to be what most offer for best price. However, watch out! If after paying for a remap your Skoda goes in for the ECU defeat mod. It will come back without the remap!! A similar thing can happen at service time.

 

There's something else I've not been able to confirm either. Many of the tried and tested maps which you may pay extra for have been verified with dyno testing. There are plenty of 'bedroom tuners' on Fleabay putting maps together with WinOls. The ECU defeat mod. will affect program code in the ECU system not normally changed by remap. What I have been unable to confirm is whether maps will be rebuilt and retested on cars that have had the ECU mod. Might be best to hold off a while. If you ever get an involuntary OE reflash update after EGR removal, your fault lights will all be back on.

 

PS: The EGR should only be operating open at idle/low rpm speeds, therefore the pain is warnings, MIL light and possible lumpy idle and limp home mode. For me the latter is a car 'dead in the water'.

Edited 10 January, 201610 yr by voxmagna

I thought plenty of tuners could do our cars via OBD now, I know Shark can, I'm sure others will too.

I'd always stick to a reputable tuning company (and avoid the 'bedroom tuners' as you say).

 

When I got mine remapped, I also got Shark's "STS" unit - this is a handheld unit that I can plug into the OBD and switch between standard and tuned map whenever I want.

When you first get the STS, you read off the standard map, email it to Shark, they create the new map and email back, so you can upload it.

Any future updates can be done this way, so I don't have to travel back to them.

I think this will be handy after the emissions update is done.

I wonder if it will still work after an OE emission re-flash at the dealer? I bought a remap file for an older BMM TDi for £40. I've been well pleased with that because the older ECU can be remapped via OBD without special tools or I can go back to OE. Try that with the wrong tool on these later ECU's which have Bosch anti tamper software and it could get bricked. Remaps for the later CR ECUs  by post are upwards to £100, which is still a lot cheaper than Shark offerings.

Back to my EGR topic:  After thrashing the motor some and running through some additive I'm no longer seeing the MIL on light, although i'm monitoring for fault codes. This is my problem:

 

If the EGR was well gunged up I would expect idle to be poor and erratic which it isn't. Before considering time consuming work pulling parts off I need to run through some vcds tests and understand what it is telling me. Unlike my earlier BMMTdi, vcds reports a lot of variable parameters under the EGR labels with some values shown as offsets.

 

Is there a resource that will help me understand what EGR measured values mean and what are normal? What values should I expect to see in the measuring blocks?

 

Thanks

I wonder if it will still work after an OE emission re-flash at the dealer? I bought a remap file for an older BMM TDi for £40. I've been well pleased with that because the older ECU can be remapped via OBD without special tools or I can go back to OE. Try that with the wrong tool on these later ECU's which have Bosch anti tamper software and it could get bricked. Remaps for the later CR ECUs  by post are upwards to £100, which is still a lot cheaper than Shark offerings.

Well, you pay your money and take your chances...

 

 

Personally I'll only go to a mapper who specialises in VAG engines, with masses of good feedback from the VAG community, and who spend a lot of time testing & developing their maps both on the road and their in-house dyno before releasing them. I wouldn't feel comfortable posting off my ECU to have a sub-£100 map of unknown origin stuck on it. I've had cheaper maps before on older VAG TDIs, which *feel* quick but have horrible big torque peaks low down the rev range, a sure way of killing your DMF and suffering clutch slip (and on 4x4 cars, who knows what that'll do to the Haldex clutch?).

Shark must have remapped hundreds if not thousands of these engines now, so I think the chances of bricking the ECU are fairly low...

They've also stated that if anyone's map gets wiped by the emissions update, if you take the car back they'll re-apply the map for free.

Incidentally they have 25% off their maps until the end of the month

Back to my EGR topic:  After thrashing the motor some and running through some additive I'm no longer seeing the MIL on light, although i'm monitoring for fault codes. This is my problem:

 

If the EGR was well gunged up I would expect idle to be poor and erratic which it isn't. Before considering time consuming work pulling parts off I need to run through some vcds tests and understand what it is telling me. Unlike my earlier BMMTdi, vcds reports a lot of variable parameters under the EGR labels with some values shown as offsets.

 

Is there a resource that will help me understand what EGR measured values mean and what are normal? What values should I expect to see in the measuring blocks?

 

Thanks

You used to be able to run an EGR self-test via VCDS; at idle, this would continually cycle through EGR being open and closed until you stopped the test. Not sure if you could monitor the inlet air mass figures while the self test was running, if so you'd expect to see the inlet air mass drop while the EGR was operational, and rise again when it closed.

Not had a close look at the EGR figures on mine yet.

Edited 17 January, 201610 yr by muddyboots

Thanks, I did  a rescan and the EGR fault hasn't come back yet. I found the vcds tests but need to look further because after asking for brake and throttle pedal presses, it came back 'not available'. It's pretty cold and I will retry after a run when up to normal working temperature, since the EGR function is disabled below 37 deg. C.

Edited 18 January, 201610 yr by voxmagna