6.4 Powerstroke White Smoke

Hey everyone, I have a 2010 6.4 F-250, completely stock and not deleted. I have had it since late 2021. A few months after getting it, I started noticing heavy white smoke coming from the exhaust after driving for about 15 minutes. This doesn’t happen during cranking or idling, except occasionally.

The truck has been mostly trouble-free aside from a death wobble issue that I fixed in a day. I have driven it from Arizona to North Carolina and then from North Carolina to Montana, and I have not noticed any engine problems besides the smoke. It used to occur every other month, but now it happens every day. I am considering the possibility of an EGR leak, but I’m not very familiar with that. Any ideas?

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Either check the hydrocarbon test kit or check your degas bottle. Either one will alert you to coolant burn. Grab your oil dipstick and inhale the scent. If it has a diesel-like odor, your injector is probably broken. Usually white smoke is used as cooling. I am assuming that the intact emissions are the cause of your problem. Top lift heads on stock 6.4s aren’t as horrible.

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A straightforward way to check if it is coolant is to smell the exhaust—if it has a sweet scent, you are burning coolant. Given that the white smoke is as heavy as you mentioned, it does sound like you might be burning coolant. As for the cause, the 6.4 has several known issues with the emissions equipment. I’ll leave the criticism to others.

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It could be a failing injector allowing extra fuel into the cylinder. I would recommend getting a scan tool and running an injector test—it is likely you will see some anomaly in that cylinder’s contribution.

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I’m grateful. I will surely investigate it. :100:

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I agree about the injectors. I am not an expert on diesels, but I had a work truck that also had white smoke, and it turned out to be the injectors.

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