What do you think about glazing up the pistons with running the engine so much with no load on it (my father is an engineer with a tractor manufacturer!)? Swan says run your engine occasionally up to 3400rpm and get the soot out!! Sounds pretty scary? What do you think? Regards Phillip
Hi Phil: It is never good to run a diesel for long periods without load. The bigger the engine, the smaller the load, the worse this is. However, this is what most sailboats do–ourselves included prior to our recent genset removal. The key, as the Swan manual alludes to, is to run the engine hard periodically. What “hard” is I am not sure. In our case, with the Hundestedt prop, we always are under load, so I don’t think it is that big an issue. We used to run at full rpm for 15 minutes (after the engine was nice and warm of course!) after each charging session. Regards–Steve
Posted by Steve Dashew (November 30, 1999)
