How to make the intake air cool and keep the valves clean

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I have heard people talk about watermeth or water-methanol injection on performance cars. I have never been a fan of it. It was just another tank that you need to keep your eye on. Keeping your eye on your petrol tank gauge was bad enough. Doing some spirited driving you can go through a tank of fuel fairly quickly.

A thing that really bothered me was the fact that the TFSI engines build up carbon on their intake valves. The older your engine get the quicker this would happen. This is due to all the oil vapor that comes from the engine breathing system. The TFSI engines are direct-injection so there is no fuel that enters the engine via the intake ports. On your port injection engines, the fuel washes off the oily film from the valve and it does not get time to burn and dry onto the intake valves. You might get a light layer of carbon but never a buildup.

Solving one of the issues of Direct Injection Engines.

I did some research on the issue and there are a few ways that will help prevent the buildup of carbon on the Direct injection engines. One way is to install a catch can that catches all the oil before the breather enters the intake. One of the other things you can do is install a watermeth injection kit. This is more a performance upgrade but one of the side effects is it helps to clean the valve. Because you use an alcohol-based substance going over the valves at a high speed it is like cleaning the valves with a power wash.

None of the solutions completely cure the direct injection engines of carbon buildup but it helps to slow down the process.

So what kit to get.

There are a few watermeth kits available. They all work on the same principle. At the end of the day it is all about setup, If you have to small nozzle it will not help you in any way. To big nozzle for the power, you run and you may run into reliability issues. The kit that I went for was the Snow Performance Kit. There are multiple kits available, you just need to decide what your needs are. The Kit I went for was the pressure-driven kit and not the MAF sensor-driven one.

The MAF sensor kit you have to wire the unit into the engine and I didn’t want to do that. The watermeth kit must be a stand-alone system that could not mess with the ECU of the car.

You get everything you need with the kit. The only thing that you need to do is to find a spot to mount everything and connect it up.

How did I install my kit

There isn’t much space in the Golf 5 GTI engine bay, so I had to find a space for everything. I designed a bracket and got it laser cut and bent. This bracket mounted onto standard mounting positions underneath the one engine mount pillar in the engine bay right behind the spotlight.

I installed the nozzle for the kit after the map sensor on the boost pipe leading to the throttle. You can install it further back from the throttle, so before the MAP sensor but it may cause the sensor to fail over time.

I mounted the controller inside the car in the glove compartment. This way the controller isn’t visible and it is easy to access for setting up purposes.

The controller is mounted in the glove compartment.

Overall impression

I was really impressed with this kit. It was easy to install, and it died its job. The Watermeth kit started spraying at a 0.5 bar boost and gradually increased the flow of the pump until it reached max flow at full boost. At this stage, I did not change my REVO settings. The one thing I did notice was that on really hot days when the engine power would usually be a bit down from the heat, the engine kept its power. It was like driving on a misty day. Cars usually feel a lot more power on cold misty days. That is actually what happens, on cold misty days the engines do make more power due to the more dense air.

This was a really good mod. This has changed my mind about watermeth kits, and now I don’t care that I have an extra tank to fill once a week.

Here is a link to some Snow Performance products:

Snow Performance Products

2 thoughts on “How to make the intake air cool and keep the valves clean”

Pingback: Is water-methanol injection worth it? - CH Crasy Ideas
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