Hey, Folks. I have a 2002 Ram 2500 with the Cummins TD (regular output, not the high output) and I've got a problem; low lift pump pressure. I have checked the fuel pressure on the low side of the injector pump and it shows 5 PSI at idle, and jumps to zero on throttle up. :(
I had noticed the truck running poorly the last 5 thousand miles (intermittenly) with some power loss from time to time and more and more frequent experiences with a gray fog from the exhaust and anemic performance. I finally decided that it wasn't just the cold weather causing it to not run well, it was something else and checked the fuel pressure at the injector pump and found the problem. However, in the process of tracking the problem down I had changed the fuel filter (between the lift pump and the injector pump (which I normally change every 15,000 miles)) and found that there was trash in the bottom of the fuel filter housing. That meant that the trash travelled from the tank through the lift pump and stopped at the fuel filter.
I use a fuel transfer tank (bought new) and I only run street-legal diesel in this truck (and that tank), and yet there was enough trash introduced to the system that it managed to (seemingly) trash my lift pump (about 300 bucks just to buy the pump). What's more disconcerting is this; the filter mesh in the tank (I dropped the tank and pulled the module with filter mesh) was NOT clogged with garbage which means that the filter element/mesh/screen there was NOT adequate to stop particulate matter that could damage my lift pump from getting to the lift pump.
So, I wasn't running a filter on the fuel from the transfer tank to the primary (factory) tank and I'm a naughty boy and I've bought a filter to go on that transfer tank to help keep this from happening again.
In the meantime, however, I still have some trash in the tank that I can't flush out, and more importantly, it's not a perfect world, some junk is always going to get into our fuel tanks (unless you just live in the city and drive only to and from work on paved roads and never anywhere else...and even then...).
So where we are with this topic is this: once junk gets into the tank there is NOTHING of consequence to stop it before it hits the lift pump. Sure, that mesh will stop nickels and diamonds and small meteors, but it won't stop trash that's capable (I checked it for tears that would; found none) of trashing a 300 dollar (just for the part, your labor or their's is extra) lift pump. Once junk gets inside the tank (whether it's rust from a transfer tank or dust from the oil patch or the farm or even if it's simply whatever funk the last user left on the diesel nozzle) it's got a first class ticket to your lift pump and a blown lift pump can quicky cost you a 1400+ dollar injector pump.
Which finally leads me to my question; what can I do to pull fuel from my factory tank to my engine that will allow me to filter the heck out of it and also use a cheaper to replace pump? I love my truck and have aspirations of hitting 400k+ miles on it, so I want something that is easy and cheap to replace that I can add onto the factory provisions which seem inadequate. My initial inspection of the fuel lines seems to indicate it's some kind of light-weight, thin-walled plastic tubing from the tank to the engine compartment, so working with that could be tricky. I don't mind installing the 300 buck lift pump I have and another, cheaper, one before that. The kind of filtration we're talking here will probably require positive pressure that might exceed suction capability, meaning it might be necessary to have a pump before the added filter I'd like to have. That would submit the primary pump (hopefully some cheap pump) to some hell to drive the fuel and junk through the primary filter, before the lift pump, but if it's cheap and and I carry a spare who cares?
Basically I want to avoid this problem from ever happening again and I'll do it by putting a gauge on the low-side of the injector pump to see what my fuel-feed pressure is and by, hopefully with the help of this post, finding a cheap pump to drive the dirty fuel through a highly-effective filter before it reaches the lift pump. I'd like to know specifics about any solutions you might think of or know of.
Thank you for your time.
--HC