EGR/Intake Service on 2013 Prius

I would ONLY replace the cooler, and personally not even that. Apart from the cooler everything’s easy to clean, and even the cooler cleaning won’t hold you up if you strategize: get it starting, soaking out the carbon, as early in the job as practical. If it’s really socked-in, a strong lye solution is best bet. It’s ok to flush down drain.

Do not use lye on anything else; it’s overkill, and corrosive for most of the components, except the stainless steel pipe between EGR valve and intake manifold. And do use eye protection, gloves, and read up on how to mix the solution safely. For mild carbon build-up, I’ve just used Oxi-Clean, much more benign, a laundry additive.

Brushes, rags and brake cleaner works. Aim for less brake cleaner and more elbow grease, as much as practical. If you have a leftover pool of brake cleaner, pour over a tray of kitty litter and leave in sheltered spot outside to evaporate.

Your main issue seems to be downtime for the car. I would make the time, don’t rush it. An EGR vacation day. Or two. Start disassembling Friday night and you should be good with the weekend ahead.

 

Yeah you wouldn't replace any of that A cooler that you can't get cleaned out can go to the machine shop and go in their tank and the next day it'll be like brand new If you go buy one I'm not sure what that intercooler cooler cost It's stainless I imagine it'll be about 300 bucks usually I just take them off junk cars get them cleaned if they have to go to be tanked so be it and now I have four or five of them laying around clean ready to go of course I don't work on this model very much so they'll probably never be used The intake manifold takes all the 5 minutes to clean You can run brushes through if you want or you can just shoot water through the fitting that the gold tube attaches to the manifold on with your garden hose and watch 3 ft streams of water come out each one of those ports and if they're all even and the same you've got nothing to do You can take your gun brush and run through there anyway and you'll see nothing come out when one is plugged you'll see one water dribbling out like an old man peeing and the other two or three ports will be shooting across the room well obviously you need to clean the one at least that's dribbling then the gold piping and any of that and run a brush through some super clean that purple stuff Chuck it on the table to dry that's it I can't imagine buying new parts just to be doing that now I will grab a used intake manifold and a used intercooler if I see it and can readily grab it when I'm at LKQ because at one point I was working on these two ZZ's now we don't do that.

 

Well wait till you take that off if you think getting the intake manifold off with something You're going to love trying to remove this intercooler not even going to go into what I do because you won't be doing that but anyway there's a bunch of write-ups about it so on and so forth be prepared to drop a 10 mm nut etc You may find it you may not I can tell you my intercooler floats between it's to end connections and what have you. Yes you need to take the intercooler off of the car and it goes into a vat of well pick your poison parts cleaners you can buy at part stores you can buy a 5 gallon bucket looking thing or a 2 gallon bucket looking thing with a strainer basket in it that you can just set the intercooler in it and drop it down in the bucket leave it for 24 hours there are pictures posted here of what they look like dirty and what they look like when they're clean It is quite a difference I have several coolers off the car clean and ready to go when I was dealing with this model just to have them ready.

 

Drain a couple of quarts from the radiator first (into a clean container), and it'll leave the cooler high and dry. The hardest connection is the bracket under the cooler: just take your time, try different extensions, short versus long socket; it can be done. The rest is "relatively" straight forward.

When everything's back together, pour that drained coolant back into the reservoir. It'll be a little high, but a few drives and it'll be back to normal. When pouring that coolant back in, it might help to leave one of the top coolant lines on the cooler off as you pour the coolant back in, to allow air to escape. Once coolant starts coming out of the hose push it back on.

There's really no way to clean the cooler properly without removal. Depending on it's condition, I'd try soaks in hot Oxi-Clean solution, for say an hour, rinse and repeat. Cork one end and fill, takes about a cup.

If it's really bad, oven cleaner or lye solution would be better. The latter much better. You can get lye crystals on Amazon; it's a common soap making ingredient.

See my signature links as well, top two in particular. On a phone turn it landscape to see signatures.

 

Not much is going to come out those coolant lines are up high The coolant is more down low You're not going to lose I don't know an ounce or two or something maybe a tad more but nothing to worry about when you go to fill up fill up like Mendel said If you didn't save the coolant don't worry about it fill it up to whatever it is the f marker b Mark or whatever it is and then drive and it will level out at the full mark done.

 

First two paragraphs in my post above is what I’ve done a couple of times now, no spillage.

 

Wow, people over complicate this job. I've don'e this lots of times. The only thing that's actually hard is removing & replacing the cooler.

• Cleaning the intake manifold is 5 minutes with a pressure washer as @Tombukt2 pointed out. Be ready to get wet. (edit to add: Those four little ports are the important part to get clean. Make sure you get a good blast of water out of the EGR inlet opening when you shoot water into each port from the engine side and vice versa.)
• Cleaning the cooler starts with it dry and using compressed air. Then clamp it with vise grips to something so you can pressure wash it from both ends. Usually no need for soaking or for cleaners/solvents. But be ready to get very wet.
• No need to drain the coolant. As has also been said, you only loose a little bit, maybe a quarter to a half a cup. You can drain it and put it back in if you don't have or want to buy more.
• You will need an E8 socket for the studs.
• The nut on that hidden stud is a pain the first few times you do an EGR job. A 12 mm socket on a 3/8 ratchet will just reach it. If you use a flashlight and get the right angle, it's visible, but you'll need to memorize that location because you can't see it once to get the ratchet in there. It's the only tricky part other than some dexterity required for removing and reinstalling the nuts on the studs connecting it to the exhaust system. With practice, it becomes almost easy.
• DON'T DROP the metal gasket between the cooler & the exhaust feed.
• Have band-aides handy just in case.

 

That is called Bear plastic and on your 2013 there's nothing that goes there You are good to go carry on

 

Yup. Just ignore it.

 

I would only use them on stainless steel components, namely the EGR pipe (between EGR valve and intake manifold) and the cooler. You don't want to use it on anything that'll react with it: the EGR valve is largely aluminum, which maybe might survive, but will look like hell. The intake manifold has embedded steel inserts, that are NOT stainless steel, and definitely will corrode up.

The only thing that warrants caustic cleaning is the EGR cooler.

If you've already used a caustic cleaner, say on the intake manifold, rinse it very thoroughly, and spray all the metal embeds with something like WD40, and really work it in with something like an old toothbrush. (I've been there...)

Addendum: reading more carefully, looks like you're done, but have used caustic cleaners on most everything. The "green" cleaner is caustic I think. Definitely clean it all well, as described above.

Too: if you simply put a cork in the bottom of the EGR cooler, much easier for soaking solutions.

My 2 cents: leave that nut off the lower cooler bracket. Even better: back out the stud there as well. Doing that, it's no longer necessary to remove the two rear studs off the cooler. And having those studs in place avoids you losing the gasket there; it'll hang on the studs.