Wednesday, February 17, 2021

An Intercooler saga

Volkswagens do apparently go forever, but only if you look after them, and ours are getting on.

Which is why our 2011 TDI Golf Wagon, the one with nearly 200,000 KM on the odometer and about 9 months and nearly 8,000 KM since its last service, went to see the garage in Courtenay last Tuesday.

For an oil change and a general checkover, and because the little pop-up notice temporarily replacing the mileage readout to remind one that routine service is increasingly overdue was also becoming increasingly insistent and annoying.

Of course, being a VW diesel the Golf’s needs cannot be satisfied just anywhere; it needs the ministrations of a fully-trained-and-certified VW technician, who works for the dealer in, of course, Courtenay, some 45 minutes away. So that required two of us and two vehicles, the other being our 1992 Westfalia Eurovan, 5 cylinder gasoline, 330,000 KM, and usually retired for the winter.

We dropped the Golf off with the dealer, and drove to Costco, where we could kill the proverbial two birds with one stone.

Having survived that, we set off for home with a full load of groceries, some of them frozen. We hadn’t even cleared the outskirts of Courtenay before the alternator light suddenly went on. It’s bright red, set just under the speedometer so you cannot miss it, and when it goes on, you stop.

We did that. There’s a display which reads out the voltage being produced by the alternator just above the window; it read 11.5V. That’s not enough, but it isn’t nothing, so I reasoned that I should be able to get home to deal with the frozen stuff if I was careful. 

(Last time that light came on we were in Clarkston, on the Snake River, on the Washington side. That time it blinked, so I thought it must be defective, and mostly ignored it. We got to just past Moscow, Idaho before the van shut down altogether and Sandy had to call the Automobile Association, who arranged a truck to take us all the way to Coeur d’Alene where there was a garage...)

Anyway, I was careful. And nervous. And then suddenly, just before the Oyster River, the light went off, the alternator started putting out the required 14.5V, and we drove home without further incident.

I went to pick the Golf up when it was ready, explained what had happened to the Service Manager (we’re on a first-name basis: never a really good sign but by now we have a history, and I have learned to have a good deal of faith in his expertise!) and left the van there, knowing they wouldn’t look at it right away, knowing it was very unlikely that an obvious explanation would be found.

Fast forward to Monday, a week later. It had snowed in Campbell River on the weekend, and we’d had some serious frost at night. The Golf had been sitting in the carport. It had not moved for three days. It was warmer, the snow was nice and soft, and although there was around a foot of it, in late afternoon I thought I could save myself some shovelling by driving the car onto the road and then back into the driveway and carport. This is not a new tactic and more often than not it works.

I got in the car, turned the key halfway, waited because it’s been cold and glowplugs work better when warm, and turned the key fully: the car sounded terrible, like one cylinder was dead, and produced clouds of white exhaust. I immediately turned it off. But that wouldn’t solve anything, so I tried again. This time, after a little coaxing, it ran a little more smoothly, idled fine, but when I stepped on the accelerator, the engine would go to only 2500 RPM. At that point it sounded terrible, and produced clouds of white exhaust. I tried letting it idle for a while. No change.

So I abandoned that. Tried again in the morning: no better.

Since “Dieselgate”, when one has had one’s vehicle serviced, VW provides 6 months of complimentary “roadside assistance”. I phoned; they arranged a tow. The truck came eventually and took the Golf away.

When Mike dropped me off at the garage in Courtenay, the Service Manager got me up to speed: no, they couldn’t find anything obviously wrong with the van, so they cleaned up some contacts. We’re left hoping for the best, and in truth, the van runs like a top. 

They had the Golf in the shop, and suspected water, but how it got into the fuel and the fresh oil was something of a mystery. He mentioned the “intercooler”; said Volkswagen would replace it for me, and we’d all cross our fingers and hope there was nothing more serious.

I drove the van home without issue.

Now I associate “intercooler” with the decal on the back of Mercedes-Benz cars of a certain age and nothing else, so when I got home, I looked up “VW TDI Intercooler”, and in the beginning of the article I found:

  The new common-rail TDI models do great in cold weather outside of one potentially serious problem – intercooler icing.  Ice in the intercooler blocks airflow and, in the worst cases, can send ice chunks or liquid water into the engine, causing serious internal damage.

...And...

Upon first starting the car in the morning, cars with icing in the intercooler will run more roughly than usual, sometimes will shake or sound like the motor is struggling to stay running.  When icing becomes serious the motor may abruptly stall or make a rough “hiccup” or “missing” type noise.


Crazy, right? Because that almost exactly describes what happened. Turns out, every car with a turbocharger has an “intercooler” to cool the incoming gasses so they explode better. Who knew?


Denouement: Today, just after 4 the garage called: the car was ready. Sandy and I debated briefly, then decided the forecast for East Vancouver Island for tomorrow was iffy, so we’d go pick up the car.

Did that. The intercooler had indeed been defective, or at least not a model designed for operation in winter. (Which is a bit odd, as we’ve been doing just that for 10 years!) Volkswagen replaced it, plus the fuel pump. We also had some “200,000 KM work” done, so it should be good for at least another 100,000 KM.

In other words, another 100 tanks of fuel.

As usual the garage provided excellent service, and made a bundle. We paid the price for our part of that excellent VW service, and VW honoured its recall.

The van performed flawlessly, coming and going, and is once more retired for the winter. 

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