I have a 2010 CRV with roughly 158,000 miles. She burns about 1 qt every 1200- 1500 miles. Depends on who’s driving. My engine light came on and I brought it to the shop. He said I need a catalytic converter. Now as you know the CRV’s have 2. So which one do I replace at $1100? A friend of a friend said he uses this BG Induction service kit to clean the air system before replacing a catalytic converter. He said 60% of the time it works.
Have any of you used this in your vehicle? If so, was the result worth it? Thanks for your input and time.

 

Front cat is the monitored cat. If you are getting a P0420 it is the front cat.

Fix your oil consumption issue or you will be replacing the cat again in short order.

 

We used to run these BG induction services when I worked for Acura. If the code you've got showing points to the cat and there aren't any other codes pointing to anything else being a problem, the BG service won't fix your catalytic converter issue. The BG chemical will clean your intake passage ways and your combustion chamber. By the time the chemical reaches your cat, it's already smoke and won't make any further difference. What these induction system chemicals are good for is correcting up-stream problems. As Ryan said above, fix your oil consumption issue because all that extra hydrocarbon washing down your exhaust isn't going to treat your next catalytic converter too nicely.

I will say it's possible that your oil consumption issues could be at least partially due to gummed up piston rings, and the induction cleaning could help clean them up a bit which would improve oil consumption, but that's about the extent of the connection. Air induction cleaning products are used primarily to remove carbon deposits from the intake manifold, the back of the intake valves, and within the combustion chamber. If you do the process correctly you won't damage anything, and the kit isn't really that expensive, so it can't hurt to do it. I will say though, it's very helpful to have a code scanner available to you if you decide to run one of these products. More often than not you get some chemical pooling in the intake somewhere and when you go for that (surprisingly satisfying) "clean-out drive" after administering the product you'll get a misfire. It'll go away in a few minutes once you've burned through all the residual chemical, but you'll still have a check engine light to clear. It took me quite a few attempts to learn just how gingerly I could apply the throttle to keep this from happening, and that's an important step when you're paid by the job. If you have to take 10 minutes to clear the code when you get back to the dealership, that's 10 minutes you aren't making money on the next car!