My dad's 1995 has a fuel heater leak. He tells me it leaks around the plug on the housing. I have not seen it for myself. He is asking me what to do. He has just installed a new lift pump and is dreading taking it back out again.
I thought I saw a post here that mentioned something about how to fix this but a search turned up nothing on point.
Anyone else experienced a leak at the electrical connector on the fuel heater?

Thanks,
Chris

 

The fuel heater can be dropped w/o taking the lift pump off the engine. The cheap fix would be to gob some grease or silicone into the plug and go from there (2 minute fix) since it's on the suction side of the fuel equation this cheap fix will work for months. The better way is to drop the pre-filter bowl then get a 7mm allen wrench to take off the mounting bolt holding the fuel heater to the mounting head. The whole thing takes less than 10 minutes, just have a roll of paper towels wrapped around your arm and everywhere else cause there is a bunch of fuel on it's way out. The new fuel heaters don't burn the contacts and leak like the old ones and you can get them at Genos for less than 40 bucks; better get a new pre-filter too since it has all the gaskets you may need, another 8 bucks. I've done both of my trucks a couple of times; they see some pretty cold temps up north so the heaters are cooking quite a bit. It's not the best of designs, but it works. If it never gets below say 10'F you can run w/o a fuel heater, when you take the 7mm bolt out, just screw the fuel pre-filter bowl into the same hole. The whole thing is a little shorter but it works and I've done it (thousands of miles driving) while waiting for the heater to show up. What an awesome motor though; I've had zero problems and the oil samples still look good from Blackstone. They both still get over 20mpg and I've burned just about everything with a carbon atom attached to it! cd

 

I simply removed the heaters out of both my trucks too. They're not needed.
There's lots of Cummins equipped vehicles that don't have heaters, and they've worked fine for years.

 

Thank you guys for the info. I was not aware you could just eliminate the heater without removing the prefilter also. I passed the info on to Dad.

Thanks,
Chris