Just gotta keep driving till its done with the regen. It can take a little bit. I wouldn't worry.

 

I think my old posts characterizing the CAT and DPF temperature profiles during regen are still here somewhere.

Basically the first 10minutes or so are spent trying to heat up the DPF to about 900F by squirting fuel down through the CAT before any good happens. At 900F, soot starts to burn up to 1250F for another 15-30min or so depending on how you're driving. So once a regen starts, shutting it down within the first 10minutes or so before the DPF got hot enough to do anything is a complete waste of fuel. Once the DPF starts burning soot, fuel is reduced to maintain a maximum DPF temperature of 1250F to avoid melting it.

If I know I'm going to be stuck in stop-and-go traffic and regen tries to start, I'll shift into nuetral to cancel it to avoid pissing away fuel indefinitely. Stop and go traffic while it's snowing outside is the worst. The DPF will never heat up enough to do anything..

The best condition for regen is constant freeway driving and constant exhaust flow. Hard takeoffs and large swings in EGT's from 'driving it like you stole it' don't do any good.

Once I've been i regen for a while, I'll shut down regen a few stoplights before my destination to stop the fuel flow and make use of the remaining heat.

It's an annoyance.

 

Glad you posted this, I was a bit worried. I just took a camping trip of about 300 miles and towing a 7000k camper mine regened 3 times. Once on the way, once while there and once on the way home. I did get to let the cycles complete each time though and the last one seemed quite long, and I was getting worried. However I noticed since the last regen I havent had one. been almost 200mi and seems like its a bit spunkier too. Guess it needed a good cleaning out, I must admit i dont drive it much and live 2 miles from work, It gets drivin about 50 miles a week maybe and one of those times its a good interstate run, So your post has put my mind to ease a bit, thinking it just needed a good house cleaning. It will get another one in a few weeks when i go camping at the beach and load my golf cart in the bed, its a good 250miles one way so hopefully it will just do what its suppose to.

 

Note regens won't start until coolant reaches 165F. (Un)Fortunately, my commute is about 18miles each way and about 40-45minutes. There's maybe 15minutes of slow 50-60mph freeway in that stretch. That's just barely enough for a complete regen.

My regens are sometimes pretty short on long haul freeway runs during the summer....20-25minutes. But other times, it'll run for 35-45minutes. There doesn't seem to be any consistency.

When I'm running unloaded most of the time, I can maybe squeeze 225miles between regens. Regen every 100-125miles while towing heavy sounds like what others are saying also

I've dropped my DPF off right after a full regen at around 30Kmiles and blew it out with a shop compressor. What didn't scatter into the wind was cup full of ash. Not sure how much that helps it breathe better. Doesn't hurt regardless.

Regarding 'cleaning exhaust' message.. The later PCM firmware versions turned off the message after displaying it for about 1-2 seconds. Apparently Ford got a lot more calls from leaving the message on than turning it off. Aside from how the truck drives and sounds differently, the way you can check if regen is still going on is pressing system-info (I forgot exactly) and let it scroll through all the status messages. If in regen, the last message will be 'cleaning exhaust'.

 

I have actually heard folks doing just that, and others going as far as using purple power, oven cleaner and other degreasers and loading up their DPFs , letting them sit then pressure washing them out with backflow washing. Those who i have heard doing this say after washing them out and letting them dry a bit and re installing them it will set the regen process off for a cycle, i guess to get all the moisture out of it but after that they say its like having a new one on it. Now i cant say one way or another about that, but its way cheaper than dropping a grand on a new DPF. I have decided that if and when mine ever clogs up I will prob go ahead and have it deleted and be done with it. But for now its not broke so i dont plan on fixing it LOL. My luck usually runs low when i start messing with things like that