My car has got 1500 miles on the clock pretty much all motorway miles done at normal motorway speed and this morning pulling into the works car park it started to perform an active regen (I'm assuming as the cooling fan was on and a strong hot smell).

 

Is this normal?

Yes.

Now time to check the Oil if you have not done so.

My new 2.0TDI required .75 litres to top up after 1,500 miles or so,

Did its first noticeable regen then as well.  & later the Ad-blue range dropped 500 miles.

My car has got 1500 miles on the clock pretty much all motorway miles done at normal motorway speed and this morning pulling into the works car park it started to perform an active regen (I'm assuming as the cooling fan was on and a strong hot smell).

 

Is this normal?

Sounds pretty normal to me - I expect it's done a few others before too, but you just haven't noticed as they'll have taken place while you've been on the motorway.

Even if your driving style means the soot is burnt off passively most of the time, the ECU will still perform an active regen every so many miles I believe (in the order of a few hundred, somewhere around 400-600 miles I think).

Different engine I know, but cruising at 60-70mph in my CR170 Yeti doesn't get the exhaust gas temps high enough to passively regen (I've monitored exhaust gas temps with VCDS).

Haven't monitored our Superb 150 so closely, but it does seem to regen quite frequently - noticed it quite often when my wife parks it up at home.

On my SII 170 it happens all the time.  I do a few hundred kms on the motorway and as soon as I'm off or around town, the regen starts.  It is just based on mileage

OK, cool, thanks for the input.

 

I also checked the oil and it doesn't seem to have shifted but I've bought a 1L bottle for top up if needed.

Not a Skoda but it worked exactly like that with the wifes Kia. Originally it did a regen every 300 miles thus it was normally easy to ensure you would be in a position to drive until complete. After an ECU update it changed to every 250 miles.

 

Annoying when you saw how much fuel was probably be wasted but far cheaper than a new DPF if a regen was missed.

 

Only problem with the Kia was what happened when you switched off before a regen finished, unavoidable sometimes. It would not carry out another regen for somewhere between 50 and 100 miles so it was a bit of a lottery where you would be.

 

On a 430 mile trip it would sometimes do 2 regens and considering that 95% of the mileage was on motorways and dual carriageways I would have expected the DPF to be squeaky clean without wasting diesel.

 

That's why we drive petrols now.

On my SII 170 it happens all the time.  I do a few hundred kms on the motorway and as soon as I'm off or around town, the regen starts.  It is just based on mileage

It'll primarily be based on soot loading - regen will be triggered once soot loading in the DPF reaches a certain amount.

If somehow the soot loading stays below that threshold for long enough, then it'll do a mileage-triggered regen.

I've noticed my car doing an active regen once in normal use since I bought it almost 3 years ago and that was a one-off drive in the 3 hour traffic jam, which qualifies as normal driving for anyone trying to get out of Dublin on a Friday afternoon. The only other time was when an exhaust pressure sensor failed in such a way that it gave incorrect but plausible readings, making the car think the DPF was blocked. My driving is more or less ideal for excellent life from a DPF though. It gets very few trips (None at all this summer come to think of it) that aren't long enough to get everything to temperature and keep it there while driving on 80+ km/h roads.