Seafoam

[bspeed3]

Hey guys, I'm considering seafoaming my engine through the vacuum line. Its an 07 with 63k on it. I've had it for 10k of that, and I haven't seafoamed, although who knows what its previous owner had done.

Has anyone here used that stuff through their vacuum line? I was hoping to get good/bad stories to determine if its worth it (both cost and potential damage to the engine I assume?)

 

[MikeHTally]

I did mine a bit over two years ago (at 16K). I used the connection on the front of the motor, rather than the one near the fire wall. It smoked a bit, not a whole bunch. I guess it's time again (at 29K).

 

[chief_wiggum]

i seafoam through the vacuum line 2X a year; not sure if it does anything other than annoy my neighbors, but if it cleans a little bit of the gunk out, it's worth it to me.

 

[b e z]

I did mine about 5k miles ago through the vac line at the firewall. I attempted to use the one at the front of the motor but with no success. Mine smoked A LOT. As far as helping the car run better i dont know, I do know it made my egr code go away and not come back.......yet. So it is good for removing built up gunk.

 

[#sand]

I've done mine about every 15K miles, not really sure if it helps that much or not but it makes me feel like I'm doing something good for it. Most of the commonly used vacuum lines seem to be in close proximity to one side of the engine or the other so I wasn't convinced it was being evenly distributed through all 4 cylinders. For myself, I've been putting it in throught the big hole in the TMIC BPV mount location. Doing it that way also gets the throttle body exposed to the seafoam. I just transfer 1/2 a bottle of seafoam into a clean dry water bottle with some holes poked in the plastic cap, push the bottle up against the hole, and have my wife start the car. It usual takes maybe a minute or so to squeeze it in (thats what she said) without stalling out the car. For the rest, I just follow the instructions on the bottle.

Like I said, I'm not sure if it really helps or not but I've got ~62,000 miles on my car with zero issues.
Good luck.

 

[MSMS3]

Seafoam will not hurt and might help a little, if used early and frequently. There are threads here and even more on the mazdaspeed forum board about how terrible the carbon buildup gets on our intake valves on these direct injection engines over time.

No fuel ever gets into the intake manifold. So the back of the intake valves and the base of those valve stems have no way to get cleaned. The proper remedy is to pull the intake manifold and manually scrub the valves with a strong solvent like denatured alcohol, Chemtool B12 and wire brushes, or media blast them with ground walnut shells. Mazda also sells a similar liquid product for the purpose.

I hear that Mazda now has a high pressure machine that does the same thing, but have not seen it yet.

I removed my intake manifold and did a thorough Chemtool B12 and wire brush cleaning at 60,000 miles. The valves were very nasty. Even this strong solvent ( much stronger than Seafoam) needed to soak for about a half hour before I could make much progress, so I would think that pushing Seafoam quickly through the manifold and past those valves via a vacuum line would not be very effective.

I did the Seafoam treatment through the brake boost vacuum line twice before doing the valve cleaning. Given how bad the valves looked, I can't say that chemical treatment via vacuum lines does much for this car.

Once that carbon and gunk gets hard, it takes serious effort to break it loose.