Best brand / model of Diesel water seperator & filter
 

Hi All,

Kitting out my Diesel for a 2 year lap of Africa.

I'm wondering what is the best brand / model of diesel water separator & filter

Thanks,
-Dan

We have used a Parker Racor 1000 (its an animal! - Fuel Filter Water Separator Turbine Series | Parker NA) for the last 3 years in the Americas for our Mercedes 1124a - 6l engine. It has been excellent. Over sizing it is a good thing if it can fit in the space you have, more filter surface area. Ensure you use the correct micron size filter (we use 30micron but 10 is available) so as not to irritate your fuel pump – pumps prefer to push not pull – as you ought to leave the existing vehicle filters in line so gives your pump more filters to pull through.

Many Europeans use Separ (separfilter.com) and all like them. I like the Racor as the filters are so easily available. If you take a 2 spare of whichever system you decide on, that will be more than enough unless you wipe a few filters out with diesel bug.

Thanks very much John,

I was thinking of going down to 2 microns - do you see any reason to not do that?

I'll be putting this on a Mercedes 3.0TD OM606 that's running the mechanical IP from the earlier OM603 engine.

Thanks,
-Dan

Of course the smaller micron the better. But as I say, your pump got to suck the fuel through! If I were you I would take advise maybe from the Parker help line regarding such a fine filter. For normal engins such a fine filter is not necessary and I suspect your pump will struggle.

You are right, I got my microns wrong, we started out with a 2 micron at first, which was probably ok on warm fuel but we were in northern Canada in December (-40) and the fuel got thick and I had to bypass the filter (make sure you plumb in a bypass loop). You may not get to very cold places but the cooler the location the thicker the fuel will become.

In short, you may need to do a bit of research regarding your pumps capacity, flow rate and all that. I mention temperature as it is something we did not test for before we set off but there are other factors to consider such as your engine height above tanks, fuel line length etc, its all adds to fuel delivery resistance. Having a mechanical pump is great. But, I am a travelling fool and only know anything from what we did wrong. If you do go to cold places, think about adding the heater.

John

Parker Racor is good. And fairly common in Africa. Which is also good. You may want to consider adding a Walbro pusher pump into your equation to relieve the OEM pump which wasn't expecting to have to do extra work :)

We use Racor on all of the Dragoman overland trucks, they work and can be bought outside of Europe.

It really sounds like Racor is the way to go.

I like the hand-priming option in case I run it out of diesel, and the built-in heater sounds like a good future-proofing option too (if it's not much more expensive).

I just have to figure out the flow rate for my engine.
I'm got a Merc OM606 3.0TD running the manual injection pump from the earlier OM603 with 6MM injection elements.
I've been digging in the forums, but have yet not found what I need.

Thanks again all,

-Dan