Purley Cross queues, valley hills and a tired air filter
Purley Cross, where the A23, A22, A235 and A2022 meet, is one of the borough's worst congestion hotspots, with lorries and buses turning across lanes. Most journeys out of the town centre start there. Engines spend a lot of time idling and creeping through the gyratory, drawing in air loaded with diesel soot from the large vehicles around them. It's a slow, steady load on the air filter rather than a sudden one.
Then there are the hills. Purley sits in a valley, so the roads out towards Woodcote, Russell Hill and Riddlesdown climb steeply. A restricted filter mostly goes unnoticed in town but shows up as a lack of pull on those climbs, especially with a full car. Commuters heading up the A23 Purley Way or to Purley station put steady miles on their cars, while some older residents' cars do very few, so we see filters that are due for quite different reasons.
On a low-mileage car, the filter often reaches its time limit long before its mileage, and we may find the rubber seal hardened or the element sagging. On a busy commuter car, it's more about dirt load. Either way, we check the element, clean the airbox, inspect the ducting for splits and fit a correctly sized OE-equivalent filter. We also look for water or silt in the intake on cars that have been through floodwater along the Godstone Road valley after a wet winter. If the old filter still has life in it, we'll tell you.
The drive is up Foxley Lane from Purley Cross to the A237, then north through Wallington to Hackbridge, around 15 minutes, and it avoids Purley Way altogether. The filter normally takes 15 to 30 minutes, so you can wait, or combine it with a service or MOT. There's always a written quote first, and a 3-month workmanship warranty on our work.