Anyone else encountered this "Hy-Carbon" system ?

http://automotive-technology.co.uk/?p=3184

Typically £150 for the 90-min 'decarb' cycle ......

First I have heard of it. I can't imagine what chemical reaction takes place between hydrogen gas and solid carbon if any. Carbon is pretty inert. It will react with strong alkalis like caustic soda.
It says hydrogen gas acts as a natural solvent on carbon, so maybe they are claiming a physical interaction. But how can a gas be a solvent? It has to be a liquid in contact with the carbon. Are they using liquid hydrogen? I don't think so.
I have heard of seafoam that you can get in the states to clean out an engine. Just squirt it into the inlet with the engine running I think. It is strongly alkaline. I would only try it on my lawnmower.

I know someone who has just used Seafoam in his Nissan VQ35 engine.

He had suffered a blocked cat (common problem on those vehicles) and after clearing the cat debris the engine smoked and the inlet tract in the manifold to one or more of the cylinders on the engine bank that'd had the blocked cat were found to have evidence of oil in them, not to mention low compression on one of those cylinders.

Some suggested that the problem could be stuck rings and that Seafoam might help so he used Seafoam the other day but at the moment the engine still smokes. Some Youtube videos suggest that the engine smokes a lot during using Seafoam and will smoke for quite a lot of miles after using it. Fingers crossed but I don't think it's fixed his problem and probably couldn't have been expected to fix it.

By most accounts though it does do a decent job of carbon removal? Some vids claim even more and show engines that had problems such as sticking hydraulic lifters that were sorted by using it.

Personally I find a bottle of snake oil works just as well.

Well I suppose I should have expected such overt cynicism on here chaps......!!

It seems to be more about steam cleaning than hydrogen cleaning per se with 'mixed results', eg. https://autotechnician.co.uk/product-review-hy-carbon-engine-cleaner/

Wait, as it is French maybe they use Perrier ..
and the 'magic' is in the bubbles ??

Scepticism from me Dave, not cynicism.

That's (possibly) just semantics Dave, you mentioned liquid hydrogen !

The French blurb states "HHO" though.... Maybe that's the 'magic'... ?

Seriously that said I have previously encountered 'decarbonising' and or 'descaling' of engines by folks squirting water into inlet manifolds. (No, I am not recommending that either). Works quite well if/when your head gasket goes though....!

A few years back I got some new tyres at ATS & they offered for a price to inflate my tyres with nitrogen promising some magical benefit. I declined on the basis that air is about 80% nitrogen already so that would be good enough for me.

nigelbb wrote:

A few years back I got some new tyres at ATS & they offered for a price to inflate my tyres with nitrogen promising some magical benefit. I declined on the basis that air is about 80% nitrogen already so that would be good enough for me.

Nitrogen is more pressure stable with varying temperature than air, so on race cars when they want to keep tyres at a specific pressure they might fill them with nitrogen. But for a road car if your tyres are getting hot it's probably better that they do get the bit of extra pressure provided by expansion of the air in them?

Nitrogen will also find any tiny leaks better which is why it is used to pressure test air con systems. So if putting it in tyres you need to be absolutely sure there's no leaks.

I was aware about nitrogen finding leaks but I thought the main reason it was used to test AC systems instead of air was because air might contain water vapour?

After pressure testing you vacuum the system out anyway so any moisture, air or remaining Nitrogen is sucked out anyway.

Back on topic, isn't HHO Browns gas, what you get after you have electrolysed water? The stuff that people claim you can run your car on?

HHO is just a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen, both colourless gasses. In actual fact, from a chemical perspective it would be HHOOHH as oxygen is diatomic.

Back to the cylinder cleaning, as a young fellow, we used to give our cars a "clean and tune" by wedging the throttle open at about 3,000 rpm and quietly tipping water down the throat of the carby, just enough so the engine started to die, but kept running, i.e. just a trickle. It certainly improved an old engine, steam cleaning the cylinder heads, and the amount of crap that would come out of the exhaust too! How we never bent rods I'll never know, but the old Holden and Land Rover, and on one occasion a 3.5 RV8, all responded well.

One of the reasons steam works so well as a cylinder cleaner is due to its expansion (which is why steam engines work, and why boiler explosions are so devastating). 1 unit of water at 100C expands to 1,700 (near enough) units of steam at 100C. Of course, as it usually finds its way in with the fuel, effectively replacing a portion of the fuel, you end up with pretty poor combustion as we all know. But, introducing it via the air intake, in small amounts, does a wonderful decarb as noted above.

Yes David, that's the kind of 'steam cleaning' we used back then too, not very scientific though as we did not actually check emissions/compression/etc figures before/after this treatment....! As you say, it also needs to be done at 3k rpm or so (ie. HOT) to be effective.

• The 'Hy-Carbon' (and similar techniques, eg http://www.enginecarbonclean.com/) are really just a variant on that of course... except for their 'magic H and O2 bubbles' ?

• However electrolysis within their boxes produces H and O2 bubbles which are added to the injected water - but the effect/s of those bubbles are not really explained: https://yullbrownsgas.com/

Thus the "Brown's Gas" deployed here - in fact just a mixture of H and O2 gases - is not really connected to the diatomic nature of water. However their claim that by adding these bubbles to water 'changes the whole molecular structure of that (host) water' is "interesting" to say the least. (The 40+ year old Yull Brown patent does not explain that claim either...)

In fact I am considering indulging in this (more out of idle curiosity than anything) on one of my cars and will report back on it, and will be more scientific this time, ie. making measurements before/after !

EDIT: Oh dear... Just looked on YT under 'carbon cleaning HHO machines'... On one vid. a D-I-Yer was adding 8 teaspoons of Potassium Hydroxide to a litre of the water used...!! Only a matter of time then until someone on YT suggests just squirting Oven Cleaner down the intake to decarb. instead ??

Seems to be a new version of these miraculous insta-service-decoke devices every decade or so.

Forget what the last one was but the blurb was seriously impressive, allegedly something developed for Canadian armed forces, good press reports from usually reliable magazines and one of the local guys got the kit. The big red beast wasn't running too well at the time a years or so later so I was tempted. Called the man to get an emphatic "Hell, no. We gave that up after it killed two engines. Should have known better."

Stripped of the blurb its just a hi-tech version of the old tip water in the carb trick described by Marshall8hp. I suspect that a modern engine ECU won't let the motor keep running it you induce enough water to be useful by simply feeding some in. So needs to talk to the ECU so as not to drown the engine.

I doubt if a modern vehicle kept in good running order builds up enough carbon to make much difference of itself so even if it does no harm its unlikely to do much good. But if Joe and Joanna Q Public have spent £100 or whatever they will convince themselves.

Browns Gas is amusing. Lots of internet puff from folk who don't understand the thermodynamics or appreciate the difference between temperature and energy. Yes Browns Gas does burn hotter but its a low energy flame so you can't do much real heating with it. Unless you have a small part carefully insulated from it surroundings the heat flows away faster than it comes in. Nice for jewellery tho'

Clive

Notice the steam cleaning effect provided by a head gasket leaking coolant into a cylinder...

davew wrote:

EDIT: Oh dear... Just looked on YT under 'carbon cleaning HHO machines'... On one vid. a D-I-Yer was adding 8 teaspoons of Potassium Hydroxide to a litre of the water used...!! Only a matter of time then until someone on YT suggests just squirting Oven Cleaner down the intake to decarb. instead ??

Thats already been suggested, not a p38 thing but it is one of the "fixes" for sticky VNT vanes on the VW diesels used in the Galaxy/Sharan forum, at least I think thats whats being suggested with the "Mr Muscle" fix.

It would seem that spraying the water through a spray bottle rather than pouring it might be a more reliable way to get it into the engine without cutting out via the carb?

Yes, a spray bottle works well and is a little more “metered”.

David: The 'Hy-Carbon' process just uses a simple tube to inject water - as the intake/plenum turbulence rapidly disperses it but yes it should be metered.

• We just used a tube to a vac. take-off on the throttle body, someone sitting in the passenger seat dipping it into a jar occasionally ... (and a later option used a pulsed windscreen-washer pump...). Also "not recommended" !

Brian: Good to see the Oven Cleaner is used on the parts once removed from the vehicle though ! On further examination it seems the Potassium Hydroxide is to aid the electrolysis, ie. it is not used in the injected water.... Phew.....

Incidentally here is a 'HHO system' that is permanently added to the vehicle.... https://www.hydroxsystems.com/

Still can not establish just what these "magic H/O2 bubbles" in any of these systems do (if anything really material at all). Lots of pseudoscience present of course, such as "the H helps the combustion and the O does the cleaning...".... but my favourite (so far) is that "the H combines with the C deposits and those resultant hydrocarbons are burnt by the engine...."...... Hmmmm....