Attached is a picture of my catalytic converter. You can see something on the surface, it needs cleaning by seafoam, at least I will do it soon.

 

Looks contaminated

 

Hi Elegancec,

That O2 sensor does appear to be contaminated. For the benefit of other readers who may not understand why you've drawn that conclusion, here are a couple of references that show the effects of various malfunctions on O2 sensors:



Cheers,

Don

 

Hi Don, I'm still thinking what type of contamination it may be, it is a light red or rosé and slight gray mixture.
The motor doesn't take refrigerant, the reservoir stays full. Light grey could be oil and yes over summer the oil level was too high on the engine for 6000 km in vacation.
It could only be that in Slovakia or Croatia the lpg qualitiy was very low and they recycled refrigerant in the lpg gas (liquified propane gas).
It is quiet easy to spray cleaner directly into the cat, but what would you recommend? I've ordered seafoam and that's the first way I think to proceed. Second could be to wash the converter, but chemical must not be harmful for the converter.

 

Hi Elegancec,

I have not tried to clean a catalyst so I don't know what is safe. I would definitey recommend that you do your research before you commit to any pariticular product - I would hate for you to discover the hard way that some chemicals can destroy a catalyst.

Cheers,

Don

 

Hi, I did a small research about it and I could find some users, who had success. There was also a test at a side called shout and seafoam got the best comments.
My plan is to spray it directly on the cat threw the O2 sensor hole to reduce the carbon particles on the surface.

https://www.shoutabout.org/review/best-catalytic-converter-cleaner/

 

I wish that site gave details of how the various products were tested and results measured. It appears that the "results" may be based entirely on user reports, which is hardly scientific.

Just please be careful - as far as I know, neither Seafoam or any of the other products mentioned are intended to be injected directly into a cat.

 

Hi,

I did some tests to see, on what the surface would react or loose some particles:
Soap - nothing happened
vinegar / citron cleaner - black particles from the thread got loosen and a kind of oil film was left on the white surface of the cup. It looks like oil.
brake cleaner - no change at all
lack thinner - no change at all
window cleaner - de icer - looses some red particles, so by wiping over with a white paper, the paper got slightly red.

So as a result: It looks like the car has burned refrigerant. It could have been mixed into the fuel, because the car doesn't take water out of the cooling circuit.
The content of the window de icer was glycol and alcohol.
When the seafoam arrives, I will also put some of it on the o2 sensor to see what happens.
I could read some people also had success with oven cleaner on cleaning carbon particles, but all special cleaners could be too sharp for the surface (washcoat) of the catalytic converter. So Don as you have said, everybody should be very careful not to destroy it.
Luckily today the MIL has stayed off, lets see for how long.

 

Cleaning did not work for the catalytic converter, I have tried with propane/buthane, ethanol and citron and flushing with destillised water and compressed air. At the first start up, it looked very good but later it was similar as before.

I had the Formular from above from a patent. But in my case it did not change anything