Owners Forums for Ford and Volkswagen MPVs / SUVs

The partner's folks have had a Touran for the last year or so, they've literally just swapped it for a brand new one which has done about 1000 miles, and managed to part fill it with petrol the other day (it's a TDI!). However, having stuck about a gallon and bit of petrol in they then brimmed the rest of the tank with diesel. If it was only a little over a gallon of petrol diluted in a full tank of diesel I would have been tempted to try it and see if it ran ok but they didn't want to do that (fair enough, it's a virtually brand new vehicle and you need to be careful with common rail fuel systems and incorrect fuel) so ended up having it recovered.

Trouble is, it's muggins here who ended up having to put it right  , and they don't make it easy to drain fuel out thesedays.... on this car, even the flippin' filler pipe is plastic welded into the tank so there's no way of separating it to drain the tank, I assumed there was an anti-syphon valve in the filler neck so didn't even bother trying that. There was no way in hell I was gonna struggle and likely get covered in fuel by trying to drop the tank whilst lying on my back on a driveway so in the end I ended up separating the fuel feed pipe from the tank sender to the engine bay just forward of the fuel tank and drawing the fuel off, the only problem was that the little squeezy bulb type hand pump I bought wouldn't draw the fuel off by itself, so in the end I ended up using the lift pump in the tank to force the fuel out in conjunction with the squeezy bulb, the only problem is the lift pump only operates for a second or so when the ignition is switched on to pressurise the system so I had to repeatedly keep turning the ignition on and off to make the pump operate! (I suppose I could have considered bridging the terminals on the pump relay to make it run continuously but that would have involved accessing and working out which relay that was, plus with all the electronics fitted to new cars I'm not sure if that may have thrown up a fault).

Anyway, it was a tedious method but it did work without huge amounts of struggling on my part, and I didn't get dirty or covered in fuel so I'm happy with tedious..... nearly 60 litres of fuel in total I got out, right to the point where the tank sender couldn't pick up any more. I've probably shortened the life of the fuel pump relay by operating it so many times but they can claim that under warranty if that's the case! 

I had to drain off a mates golf and used a similar procedure, disconnected the pipe at the filter and then ignition on/off about 100 times lol. I did also contemplate how to get the pump to continuously run but it was nearly midnight and this was the easiest way