I've got two issues with my beloved current Omega. This is one of them. (The more serious one.)

So, my car is a 2002 2.2 DTI (Caravan) with a mileage of around 350K kms. (This is just a rough estimate. Could be anywhere between 300K and 400K.) In the first 3 years when I had it, it had no problems with starting up in cold weather. Then, last winter, it began having problems starting up all of a sudden.

The pehonemenon is that the colder it is and the longer the car's engine was tirned off, the harder it starts. I know it's otherwise normal that diesel engines start harder in cold, but my car's engine would hardly start, at all, after having spent over 8 hours in temperatures under 0 degrees celsius. So, what I experienced was that the difficult startup was not as bad if the car had been out in the cold for less than 8 hours.

The worst case was when I had to leave the car out in the snow in under -15 degrees celsius for almost a whole day. After that, it took quite a while for me to be able to start the engine. It would only start for the third or fourth attempt, after starting for 10's of seconds. And when it finally did start, first, it was as if only 2 cylinders had been working, and some bluish smoke came from the exhaust.

What do you guys think the problem could be?

Oh, one more thing probably worth mentioning: I had the glow plugs replaced last autumn, but I was told that one of them could not be screwed back to its place entirely. Could this have anything to do with the difficult start?

hoofing it wrote on 05. Sep 2011 at 13:56:

Thank you for the tip.