Mortimer, Berkshire: Mobile DPF Cleaning
With call-out DPF cleaning, we come to the motor. No body shop, no filter going anywhere. A fitter drives out to your address in Mortimer, clears the diesel particulate filter as it sits, performs a DPF regeneration, and you hold on to the filter you started with.
Nobody leaves until the number is fixed by the phone. The visit takes typically around 2 hours and the clean opens from £299.
Most owners find us with the light already on, and the vehicle low on power. That is the situation this page is written for.
What to check when the DPF light comes on
The filter is not automatically what is wrong, and that leads. A clean is not where a visit opens. A check is — several faults appear as the same warning.
Second thing: how you drive it between now and then matters.
- Worth a try before you ring anything: amber light, vehicle driving fine, just one even run, no outlay.
- Once the car is in limp mode, driving will not touch it. The window has shut.
- Stop planning long drives and get it looked at if the cabin stinks of diesel or there is black smoke when you press on.
Signs the vehicle has been giving you
The light is belated news. By the time it shows, the symptoms have generally been mounting for a while:
- power falling off, above all climbing uphill
- you notice the revs stop short of where they once went
- economy that is worse than it was
- silently, the stop/start gives up
- the cabin stinking of diesel, or smoke when you press on
That is not proof by itself. The light with them points at a blocked filter.
Blocked diesel particulate filters near Mortimer, and the reason
Being a rural village, Mortimer throws up precisely the use a DPF handles the poorest. A regeneration needs long enough and heat, and sees not much: not on the school run to Mortimer St. John's C.E. Infant School, not on King Street at half past eight, not on ten minutes to The Co-operative Food, and not on the dash to the nearest station. What should burn off stays put.
Save when you have a routine cause to drive out to the M4, under 5 miles from Mortimer, or out to Winchester under 25 miles away, entire weeks slip past without a long steady run. Geography is unhelpful.
The stage a DPF regeneration can no longer complete
The vehicle is looking after itself, which is what limp mode amounts to. The real difficulty is that a sustained drive works by starting a regeneration, and once in limp mode the revs will not rise and power is capped.
Good advice, that motorway run — until the point it is not. Past that point — limp mode — driving will not be enough, and the filter requires a clean.
Where the motor stands is where the DPF is treated round Mortimer
The filter does not leave it. That is the detail most owners do not expect: the job happens with the DPF still fitted to the vehicle, on your drive, in a work car park, wherever the motor can wait for a couple of hours.
The ECU is taken first, showing soot load by percentage and by weight, along with a look over of sensor readings, glow plugs and related components, so nothing is cleaned while another fault is still open.
After that comes the clean itself: cleaning fluid in through the car's own access port, opening out inside the filter and lifting what a regeneration never can. A second pass is sometimes needed on severely blocked filters.
What the clean has freed is then burned off by a regeneration. That is a monitored drive out of Mortimer if you are along, or a static regeneration where the vehicle stands, with the running data verified after.
Finally the scan runs again — the change proven, the light cleared, anything still open logged. Both read-outs reach you by email, so the numbers are recorded.
Where a clean is not the solution
Treatment fixes one thing: a filter choked with soot and ash. It does nothing for:
- a pressure or temperature sensor reporting a block that is not there
- the EGR valve jammed open
- AdBlue system failures
- a regeneration that hardly ever starts, because of glow plugs or injectors
- a turbo putting oil through the filter
The first check is there for exactly that. Where one of those is the fault, you hear about it at the outset rather than once the money has gone already.
Two more worth knowing. Leaving the filter gutted is not a remedy — a vehicle without a functioning DPF fails its MOT and driving it is illegal. And cleaning is sometimes described as DPF renewal: nothing is exchanged, your own filter is cleared in place and put back into use.
DPF cleaning charges around Mortimer
Cleaning begins from £299, with the call-out charge on top of that for every visit — it covers the call-out, the booking, the checks and the advice.
The figure is fixed by the phone, once we know the vehicle and what the filter is apt to need. No flat rate could be straight. What you own and where you are both change it: Mortimer itself, over at Four Houses Corner, or further out within the RG postcode area.
Treatment that will not do it is not a clean you pay for, and the scan is what says so. You still pay that charge: someone came out, ran the check and gave you the advice.
A 30-day warranty takes in aftercare on the clean, and that includes an engineer coming back out to Mortimer if the light returns inside the time.
Rang them and they came out the same day, done a deep clean on the dpf, so will have to see if it has worked.
Nic did great service, explain al the process and did very good job, I will recommend this guy and the company!
Very friendly polite operative who arrived on time messaged me to say he was here. Told me there wasn't a fault with the DPF so there would be no charge gave me a few suggestions on what it might be so will check those out. Thanks Chris.
Where we get to around Mortimer, and what we clean
Cars, panel vans and light commercials, HGVs, construction and plant machinery, farm vehicles — the one on-site service across all of them, and on all of them the filter is done on the vehicle rather than taken anywhere.
Mortimer is seldom a special trip: our engineers are out on King Street week in week out, and the same run covers Four Houses Corner, Mortimer West End and the villages out past Stratfield Mortimer. It is the diary, not the distance, that settles whether it is one day or the next, and coverage extends UK-wide — so phone still from even further out across Berkshire.
About Mortimer
Mortimer is a village in Berkshire, situated in the inland countryside of South East England, with an elevation of around 96 metres. Mortimer lies approximately 41 miles west of London and 24 miles north of Winchester, near the smaller settlements of Summerlug and Four Houses Corner. Mortimer has a population of around 2323 people, predominantly living in detached houses. Mortimer is also closely associated with the nearby village of Stratfield Mortimer.
Frequent questions on DPF cleaning in Mortimer
- Can I just take it for a long drive?
- Sometimes, if you catch it in time and the vehicle has not fallen into limp mode. A sustained run at motorway speed is what it needs — not ten minutes to The Co-operative Food and back.
- The visit lasts how long?
- It is typically around 2 hours. A severely loaded filter can require a second clean, which extends that.
- Price across Mortimer — what is it?
- The call-out charge takes in the visit, the diagnostic and the advice; treatment itself begins from £299. The vehicle and your address both move the price, so we settle it on the phone.
- Must I be there in person?
- No. The motor needs a spot to stand for a couple of hours; you do not need to stand with it. Come along if you would rather, and the regeneration turns into a watched drive.
- When can someone come to Mortimer?
- That depends on the calendar, but it is often same-day or next-day. Ring 0303 330 1830 and we will say to you what is free across the RG area.
- Does the filter come away from the car?
- Cleaned where it sits, on this service, so no. And neither does taking a filter off nor fitting one back on is work we do.
- What if the light reappears?
- The 30-day warranty takes in aftercare, including an engineer coming back to Mortimer.
Organise DPF cleaning across Mortimer
Talk us round what the vehicle is doing on 0303 330 1830, whether that is smoke, limp mode or the light. Nobody goes to Mortimer before you have a quote and a time. If the lines are closed, enquiries@dpf-fixer.co.uk comes to us and gets dealt with first thing.
ISO 14001 certified, SafeContractor approved, ISO 9001 certified and SSIP Approved, and any engineer maintains public liability insurance.
Mobile DPF Cleaner is a trading name of DPF Fixer Ltd, which is rated 4.5 out of 5 from 1,989 reviews on Trustpilot. The rating is held by DPF Fixer Ltd.