Smoke from the engine bay

henleyryan

henleyryan

henleyryan

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Joined
4 Oct 2004
Posts
231
Location
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Hi all, long time no type! I've got a new (to me) car recently and it was working perfect for the first couple of months. Then during a cold snap in mid November, I started it in the morning and began scraping the ice off the windows, after about 30 seconds of the engine running on the driveway smoke started to pour out from the engine bay. The warranty company were very helpful and agreed that it was not classed as drivable and towed it to my nearest garage. Now the garage have been saying that they can't find any problems with the car at all. There are no signs of any fluids on the bottom of the engine or the top of the undertray. Is it possible that the fault will only present itself when the weather is cold? Like an exhaust manifold/gasket shrinking? A video of the fault is here;

https://1drv.ms/v/c/a4741802742ad257/IQCc3XTt3SAqS6W94_pPrL7CAYNQ7Jsw0nbIZOSZclxAdu0
 
If it is indeed a webasto aux heater, type "can a webasto aux heater leak water?" into Microsoft Copilot to get ideas about what it could be.
 
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God I love this forum. Thanks for the pointers people. But, I'm not sure the car has an auxiliary heater, 2018 Seat Alhambra, usually when the weather is cold I don't get any heat into the cabin until the engine has warmed up, which can take 10-20 miles on country roads.
 
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It's the 2.0 litre diesel, 185ps version. A bit of googling seems to indicate I probobly do have an auxiliary heater... The plot thickens.
 
henleyryan said:
It's the 2.0 litre diesel, 185ps version. A bit of googling seems to indicate I probobly do have an auxiliary heater... The plot thickens.
Click to expand...
It certainly looks like the kind of smoke you can get from an auxiliary heater - I've had people more than once knock on my cab door to say my truck is on fire when it's heater kicks in!

You should be able to hear the heater running...

I'm a little puzzled as to why your car would have one mind you!
 
I can't be 100% sure but the pipe you focus on at 1:47 looks like a Webasto type auxiliary heater exhaust - and the whooshing sound I can hear over the engine noise also sounds like one - follow the pipe up with a torch and you might find an Aux heater.

The ones on both our Land Rovers only kick in on stone cold engines when the outside temperature is under 6c. The first time they fire up in any year they have a couple of attempts at starting that leads to a similar smoke show.

Does the steam/smoke smell diesely like a camping lantern or old boat ?
 
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