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I bought the car in March, for about 50k NOK. It was my first car, and I loved it very, VERY much. A month later, it suddenly lost power, and as anyone can guess, the problem was the DPF, apparently. However, the day after, it was fine again, and ran just like before for a few days more before it once again lost power. I freaked out, and tried reading up on this. I knew for a fact that the DPF that was on the car was nigh brand new, only about 5-6k km old, so to speak, so I felt there had to be some other explanation, especially given the come-and-go characteristic of it. I eventually figured the EGR might have something to do with it, but others with knowledge on the topic assured me it was the DPF, so I kind of just left that explanation behind.

A few weeks later, it lost power for good, and I decided to send it to a mechanic(I hadn't done that before, as I spent my money on actually buying the car). In my fear of insane mechanic bills, I set a maximum price of 10k NOK ahead of the appointment, and the chief mechanic agreed.

After they'd tried forced DPF cleaning twice and changed an (apparently) faulty MAF, they opened up the top of the engine and found 2 faulty seals. They changed all the seals, and put it back together again. It ran fairly ok, with about 60-70% power and a flashing DPF lamp. It came in at exactly 10k NOK, even though they'd put in a few more hours than what came on the bill. They never once thought about checking the EGR.

I was happy with the broken seals explanation, as broken seals would mean oil in the engine, more soot and particle buildup and thus a far more quickly filled DPF. At least that was my theory. But when it broke down again less than a week later, it greatly depressed me, and I didn't really know what to do about it.

Fast-forward 4 months of the car just standing around un-used, my father decided to help me out, despite his immense hatred for used car trouble(he's an ex-mechanic who quit because of health issues, and he's had a ridiculous amount of bad luck with his cars so far in life).

We start digging in a little info first, and figure out it could be one of very many things: Broken Turbo, clogged DPF, broken/clogged EGR, ECU fault and so on... We started out by buying a bottle of 250NOK DPF cleaning fluid. We ran it through the DPF, and got out a ridiculous amount of grot. When we flushed it clean with water, we kept at it until no more soap came out, only clean water. When we put it all together again, the car wouldn't start at all. We figured out we could test the EGR. We made an aluminium plate and blocked it, and the car ran just fine, albeit at the 60-70% power level. A few weeks later, when we both had time again, we took it off, opened it and cleaned it until it ran as smooth as ever.

I've been driving it for a few weeks now, and it's pretty stable at this point, at the 60-70% power DPF flashing level. A friend of mine casually mentioned he had an OBD2 scanner lying around that I could borrow. So I plugged it in, read the 1 fault code that was in there (the added picture), cleared it, and found it again the second I started the car. It popped up as soon as I turned the ignition, and registered with a lot of 0's. Is that normal?

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