P249E: Closed Loop Reductant Injection Control At Limit - Flow Too High
What to do
Say where the reductant fluid has come from. If it has been topped up from anything other than a sealed container of the correct fluid — or if water has ever been added — that is very likely the answer, and it is the cheapest one.
Expect the system to be putting in more fluid than usual, so consumption between top-ups may have risen noticeably. That is worth mentioning too.
This will not stop the car today, but it does not fix itself and it escalates. Left alone, the emissions system moves through its warning stages towards limiting the vehicle's speed and eventually preventing it from restarting.
What this code means
The reductant system has increased its dose as far as it is permitted to and still cannot bring nitrogen oxide output down.
This code is the sound of a correction running out of room. Closed loop control gives the module authority to trim the reductant dose up or down around a base figure. When it has trimmed all the way up, held there, and the downstream sensor still reports too much NOx, something is wrong that more fluid cannot fix.
That framing narrows the diagnosis usefully, because it rules out the obvious. The system is not short of reductant — it is delivering as much as it is allowed to. So look at whether the fluid is doing anything when it arrives.
- The catalyst may be aged, poisoned or damaged, so the reaction it is meant to host no longer happens efficiently.
- The reductant may not be reductant. Diluted or wrong fluid meters correctly and reacts weakly, which produces exactly this pattern.
- The injector may be partially crystallised, delivering a fraction of what the module believes it commanded.
- The downstream NOx sensor may simply be reading high, in which case nothing is wrong at all except the sensor.
Check the fluid before the hardware. It is the cheapest possibility and, on vehicles that have been topped up from an unmarked container, a genuinely common one.
Likely causes
Start here
- Reductant diluted or incorrect fluid · moderate
- Crystallised reductant injector · moderate
Less common
- Aged or contaminated SCR catalyst · specialist
- Faulty NOx sensor · moderate
- Exhaust leak upstream of the sensor · moderate
Symptoms
Components involved
Information, not instruction
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Have anything you intend to act on checked by a trained person against the manufacturer's own procedure for your vehicle. Nothing here replaces that procedure.
Community experience
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