How to Replace Fuel Filter 2003-12 Volvo XC90

Hey friends, it's Len here or 1A Auto. Today, we're working on our 2004 Volvo XC90, and I'm going to be replacing the fuel filter. It's going to be super easy. I can do it. You can do it too. If you need this or any other part, as always, you can check us out 1aauto.com. Thanks.

Okay, so first thing first, eye protection, hand protection, and of course make sure anytime that you open up by any lines on this, you have your mouth closed. You don't want any fuel getting into your mouth, your eyes, on your skin if you can avoid it. All right, safety first. Number one concern. Come over here. Here's where your fuel filter is. Just make sure you're dealing with the right thing. It looks like it's about the same size as far as I can tell visually. On the fuel line itself, you've got this little cap right here, and this is just like with your tire, with a little Schrader valve side, you can give that a little press and that's going to relieve any fuel pressure that's still in the lines. I'm just going to grab a pocket screwdriver. We'll give it a little squeeze.

Just make sure we got our bucket so it's going to catch as much of this as possible fully. All right, so that's it for pressure. I'm pressing on that, so that's great. Volvo did a great job with that. It was a great idea. Generally speaking when you go to take off these lines, there's still pressuring them. You get it to come off, it starts coming off, it starts coming off, and then once it does, it goes ... and it just sprays in whichever direction it wants. Volvo was smart. They gave us a little drain here. Let us put it straight into the bucket. You know, I really liked that idea. Thanks Volvo.

You can pick whichever line you want to start with. On these lines, there's little squeeze buttons essentially. There's one right here, it looks like a rectangle, and there's one directly on the other side of the line. Same thing. You can either squeeze these with your fingers, give them a little squeeze, give the line a little twist and draw it off. Or you could try to use some pliers if you don't have the finger strength for it. That's okay. Generally speaking, it's also a good idea to push in and then squeeze and then pull out. I'm just going to grab my pliers. It makes my life a little easier. I'll try to squeeze right on those tabs. Now I'm going to pull it. Looks like it's close.

I'm going to give it a little spray with some penetrant. See if that gives us a hand. This line right here actually has like a set of O-rings inside of it and a little thing that goes over this. A lot of times what happens is the O-rings will stick to this area on the filter, and even though you're moving the outer area, the inner area is still sticking to the filter.

When you go to pull the line off, it'll actually pull the O-rings out with the fuel filter, in which case, unfortunately you'd have to either replace this end or replaced this whole fuel line which you know goes up, and we'd have to see if this side goes up to the vehicle or up to the fuel pump. But either way, you'd have to replace the fuel line or the end. I just put a little bit of penetrant in there and I'm going to let it work its way in for a little bit here. Put it on both sides, of course. I'm going to work it and we'll try it again. Nice. That came off easy once we put a little penetrant on there, Just let this drain out. Awesome.

I don't know if you can see inside there or not, but that's all the little doodads in there that I was talking about. You got some O-rings, you've got your little coupler that slides over the fuel filter neck here. A lot of times what happens is that stuff all just kind of pulls right out, so go with a little penetrant, work it in, let it do its job for a second, and then go ahead and continue. I'm going to do this rear one. If I can make it so I can get to it here. There we are. Let that one drain our. Okay.

Now that we have both these ends off, we have a mounting bolt here and that kind of pinches this ear down to the other ear that wraps around the fuel filter, so theoretically if you loosen this up enough, you shouldn't have to take it all the way out, but it really doesn't hurt anything to just take it all the way out. So that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to give it a little bit of penetrant. Here we are. Now we'll grab our tool and we'll remove this bolt. We're going to use our 12mm socket and a ratchet. We're going to remove this bolt.

Something to keep in mind is gases flammable and combustible, so you want to make sure you don't use anything that's going to create a spark or fire or anything. That bolt was a lot shorter than I was imagining it was going to be. That's what size it is. There we are. We've got our fuel. I'm going to grab a cup. I want to show you something.

All right, so we're just going to dump out whatever fuels inside this right into this cup. We'll just take a look at what it looks like, what this fuel filter actually does for our vehicle. Go that direction. The magic is actually, once it sits for a while, the fuel sits and it settles, that's when you really see the sediment and the crud that's floating around inside your fuel system. It's getting pretty nasty. Cool. We'll set this aside, let it do its thing for a little bit and then we'll show you what it looks like.

All right, so our little test that we were doing went awry and it ate a hole through the bottom of our cup, so that didn't work out very well. We'll put that back in the recycling bin there and we'll try with this one. We'll just let it do its thing and we'll see what kind of sediment we get.

Okay, so as you can see, there's a lot of sediment that came out of that fuel filter, which tells me that the fuel filter was doing a great job. It also tells me that there's a possibility that the gasoline that they were using might not have been top tier, but this is bound to happen over time anyways. I just wanted to show you what the fuel filter does. It essentially just kind of filters out this type of stuff.

Now we've got our bracket for our fuel filter. We'll notice we've got this little ear here, and that's just so when you put this fuel filter up in, you tighten it down, the ear holds the top and the bottom's resting up against the lower area of this. That makes it so the fuel filter can't slide around. We're going to put this up into the vehicle now. We've got our bolts. There's a little ear right here that goes in there. Then of course the bolt goes into the bolt hole.

All right, We have the fuel filter mounted. Give it a little wiggle. Make sure I can't slide any place. That looks pretty darn good to me. Pick a line, bring it up on there, slide it right inside, and then push until you feel a little clunk. There it is. Give it a nice little tug. It's going nowhere. Do the other line. Give it a little tug. That feels good. All right, we just need our little cover. Grab that. There it is. Make sure we cover that back up. Perfect.

We're going to get this all nice and cleaned up so it looks good. We'll bring it back down. We're going to run the vehicle and we're going to take a peek under here and make sure we don't have any leaks coming from anywhere. I don't assume that there will be any, but it's always a good idea to double check. The Last thing you want to be doing is driving down the road with a trail of fuel going behind you.

We'll just start it up. There we are. Let it run for a second here. All right. Okay, so we just ran it. I'm taking a peak. This is nice and dry down here. I see no fuel leaks, so it looks a-okay.

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