Cleaning your air mass meter / MAF – does it work?
Many customers tell us that friends or internet forums recommend to clean the air mass meter with cleaning chemicals designed for removing brake dust or other cleaning solvents.
It should be said that these customers contact us anyhow to buy a new airmassmeter.
Why should the cleaning process work anyhow? The most common reason air mass meters lose their performance or even stop working at all is that they slowly get dirty. That is also why most of the time you will notice a slow loss of performance and increase in fuel consumption (In case your airflow meter should abruptly stop working cleaning won’t help anyways).
So, what do you normally when do when something is dirty? You clean it!
Thoug this might apply to your kitchen sink, air mass sensors usevery precise and sensitive measuring technology and aren’t designed to be cleaned.
In fact, the cleaning process worsens the situation because even more dusts gets onto the sensor or even worse, the aggressive cleaning chemical destroys the airflowsensor completely.
Conclusion: When symptoms of a destroyed airmassmeter (MAF) appear, it’s most of the times the beginning of the end. Only part of the dirt particles can be removed and it normally doesn’t take very long until the engine shows again symptoms of a defect MAF. Maybe a way to get the car running for a while, but definitely nothing long term.
Tuesday, December 16th, 2008 @ 5:24 pm 
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May 6th, 2009 at 11:20 am
HI. I own a 2006 Merecedes E320 CDI fitted with the latest 3.0 litre V6 TurboDiesel engine. Out of curiosity, I decided to have a look at the air intake system on this engine. The car has two separate air filters, feeding air into both ends of a common plastic intake manifold, which feeds into the turbo which sits at the back of the engine in the valley between both banks of cylinders.
I can see two separate air mass meters (one for each bank of cylinders?) plus what looks like a device to measure the pressure drop behind the left hand air filter – presumably as a way of indicating to the driver that the air filters need replacing – is this correct.
What surprises me is that both air mass merers appear to be glued/clamped to this manifold! Thus if one or both air mass meters needs to be replaced the whole intake manifold would beed to be unbolted and changed. Is this right? Sounds very expensive!!
August 4th, 2009 at 10:15 am
What you are looking at is probably a map sensor that measures turbo boost before and after the throttle plate.. the mass airflow should be on a short hose near the air filters.