Air filters, the pros and cons of cleaning versus replacing
In this blog we tell you the advantages and disadvantages of cleaning air filters. What are the risks and what should you pay attention to?
Air filters have an important function. They ensure that clean air is supplied to the engine. This air, together with the diesel, forms the fuel mix that ignites in the cylinders. Especially in modern engines, a lot of air, under high pressure, is added to the fuel mix. You can imagine the consequences if there is no proper filtration and you get contaminants in your fuel mix. In the long term, the combustion of these contaminants will cause deposits on your cylinders, cylinder heads and valves. This causes extra wear and tear and poorer performance of your engine. If too much contamination builds up, your engine can even break down.
Primary and secondary air filter
In an air filter you often have two filter elements; the primary and secondary filter. The primary filter has the function of cleaning the air from contaminants. The secondary filter prevents dirt from entering the channel to the engine during maintenance. So it is not as many think that the secondary filter is a second step in the filtration and removes even smaller contaminants. This is an important point to remember, because this misunderstanding is often the reason why people think that you can clean the primary filter without too much risk, as long as you leave the secondary filter in place.
The benefits of cleaning instead of replacing
There are many reasons why cleaning is sometimes a good solution. First of all, if your machine breaks down on the construction site or has significantly reduced performance, you can clean the filter with air so that you can continue. This saves you a day or half a day of downtime and you can continue straight away.
You can also save money by cleaning your air filters. It will of course save costs if your air filter can last a second cycle. By cleaning you can remove quite a lot of the contamination from the filter, so that it can last about half the normal lifespan.
Tip for cleaning an air filter
As discussed above, the most important thing is to prevent damage to the primary filter. This filter prevents dirt from getting into your engine and is therefore the most important filter of the two. This filter contains the finest filter media and also contains the most contamination.
It is best to clean an air filter with air pressure. You do this by blowing the dirt out of the filter in the opposite direction, i.e. from the inside. To ensure that you do not damage the filter, you should never use more than 5 bar of pressure.
Once you have cleaned the filter, check it extra carefully for damage. A small damage quickly becomes a major damage when you put the machine back into use. Due to damage, polluted air simply enters the engine directly.
Benefits of replacing an air filter
Of course, it is always the cost-benefit consideration that makes you decide to clean a filter and not replace it. That is why it is also good to consider the advantages of replacement. To help you decide, below are a number of advantages of replacing compared to cleaning your air filter.
Better performance and lower consumption
When you clean the filter, contamination and dirt always remain in the filter. This ensures that your filter does not let the air through that a new one would. This means that your engine gets less air than in optimal condition. This reduces the performance of your engine, makes it work harder and increases your consumption. You wouldn't expect it, but the consumption of your machine can increase by up to 14% if you have an unclean air filter in your machine.
Longer lifespan of your engine
With clean air filters, your engine gets the optimal mix between fuel, diesel and air. This ideal mix also ensures optimal combustion in the cylinder. Optimal combustion means that the mix of air and diesel is as optimal as possible and has as little incomplete combustion of fuel as possible. If this is the case, contamination will form on the cylinder wall, cylinder head and inlet valves.
This is assuming there is no damage to the filter media. If this is the case, polluted air with dust, pollen and everything in the air goes into your engine and is burned with the air and fuel mix. You can imagine that this does not do your engine any good on the inside and causes deposits on the internal parts of your engine. It's a bit similar to your fireplace. It is best to have this swept every year if you use it a lot. You can see the reason for this in your fireplace; the soot deposit. Exactly the same thing happens to your engine if you let polluted air into it. The big disadvantage is that you cannot see this and cannot have it cleaned. You only find out when your engine is ready for an overhaul. An expensive and time-consuming job.
Conclusion
There are certainly disadvantages to cleaning your air filter compared to replacing it. But you have to know exactly what you are doing when cleaning and you cannot always see whether you have really blown the filter clean and even more importantly whether you have not caused any (minuscule) damage to the filter media. If you look at the pros and cons, we would always recommend replacing the filter. Not to sell you a new filter, because even if you clean, you will come back to us for a new filter, but because filter elements are actually not that expensive at all. You can prevent a lot of bigger problems by keeping your filters in good condition.
If you want to see if we have the filter you need, take a look at our air filter webshop by clicking on the link below.
Mann Air filters
One of the brands with a wide range of air filters is Mann+Hummel. We can highly recommend these filters, because Mann has been a manufacturer for many OEMs in trucks, cars, agricultural and construction machinery for decades. Because Mann supplies so many brand original filters to the OEMs, we also have an extensive Mann cross-reference database. If you want to go directly to the Mann cross-reference tool in our webshop, click on the link below:
Fleetguard Air Filters
Another brand we can recommend is Fleetguard. This brand is part of Cummins, one of the largest manufacturers of engines in construction machines and agricultural machinery. Because Cummins develops both the engines and the filters itself, you can assume that Fleetguard filters provide optimal performance, especially if you have a Cummins engine in your machine. We also have an extensive cross-reference database for Fleetguard. If you want to go to the Fleetguard webshop, click on the link below:
CATEGORIES
Connect with us
© 2026 – Boar B.V.