My girlfriends saturn has a cooling system with an aluminum radiator & heater core. It seems to need flushing. Its already been flushed by a mechanic with the reccomended standard flushing additive. Still not much heat. Dex-cool was the coolant used prior to this problem. I need advice on an alternative cleaner that wont dissolve the system.
If by "still not much heat" you mean that the heater is the problem, then the radiator is *not* the problem. A partly clogged radiator will give you
*more* heat. A fully clogged radiator will give you an overheated engine that boils over.If you want to flush the heater (which I have done on two different cars over the last three years), and you've already used a standard liquid flush, then try this: Get a six-foot piece of heater hose at your car-parts store (check the size on your car: they're around 5/8 in. or so inside diameter). Then go to Home Depot or the hardware store of your choice, and get three screw-type hose clamps, a replacement garden-hose female fitting, and one of those inline ball-valves that we lazy people use to shut off the water at the terminal end of our garden hoses. They have a male fitting on one side and a female fitting on the other. In plastic, they're around $2. In metal, they're around $3. Plastic is better.
Cut off 2 feet of your new heater hose. Stick the replacement female fitting in one end and clamp it with a hose clamp. Unclamp both heater hoses on the car at the firewall. If you have to cut them off with a knife, don't worry about it. You'll have hose left over to replace at least one of them.
Take the 2-foot piece of heater hose with the hose fitting on one end, stick it on one of the two nipples coming out of the firewall and clamp it (not too tight; this is a temporary fitting, and I grease it with Vaseline to make the job easier). Take the remaining 4 feet of your new hose and stick that on the other nipple, and clamp it.
Screw your garden hose into the ball valve, and then screw the ball valve into the new fitting on the 2-foot piece of hose. Arrange the end of the
4-foot hose so you don't get soaked. Turn on the water, Snap the ball valve on quickly; run it a couple of seconds; snap it off quickly. Repeat until the pulses of water coming out of the 4-foot piece of hose don't look rusty anymore.If your heater core is really rotted, this will soak the inside of your car while finally ruining your heater core for good. That's never happened to me. In each case, I've had a clean heater core after about ten pulses of water, and they've both worked great.
Good luck.
Ed Huntress
I question if the system needs flushing. Any other symptoms? Maybe a different thermostat?
After the mechanic got done with it I noticed that the temp gauge was running higher than normal. Im assuming that the whole system has problems now.
mechanic replaced the thermostat & its housing after he broke it
He could have installed a "winter" or higher temperature thermostat.
Maybe, but not necessarily. It depends somewhat on how quickly the temperature goes up, and whether you're driving the car around the block or across the state.
Have you tried back-flushing the radiator? You don't want to put pressure on it like you can with a heater core, but isolating the radiator by taking the hoses off, and flushing hard from the bottom nipple, may fix that.
But, if it's a lack of heat in the car that's your problem, I'd go at the heater core itself first, using my straight-through enema approach.
Ed Huntress
The actual temp that the system runs at is really irrelevant just so long as it regulates that temp. You should be able to put a piece of cardboard in front of the radiator and the system should still run without overheating. Since I don't know where you are, anything from 50% (Ariz. in the daytime) to 90% (Maine) of the radiator can be covered for this test. The thing that is nice about this test is that pulling the cardboard will quickly cool the system before things go bad.
-- Bob May Losing weight is easy! If you ever want to lose weight, eat and drink less. Works every time it is tried!
Roy J wrote in news:GjOVb.13$u snipped-for-privacy@news.uswest.net:
Or the heater core is plugged up. Without doing what Thomas suggested with the hoses on the heater core, isolated, you won't know. Has anyone ever put stop-leak in it?
Dexcool is bad stuff, real bad......
It's probably air-locked. That means there is a big bubble of air in the system that the water pump can't move. In severe cases the air bubble will cause the water pump to cavitate- to mix the air and water into foam. Foam won't cool the engine. Newer cars have very specific methods of removing the air from the cooling system. Get the shop manual, follow the procedure, and hope you haven't roasted the engine. And get a new mechanic.
-Carl
|On 09 Feb 2004 12:49:37 GMT, snipped-for-privacy@aol.com (Wwj2110) wrote: | |> My girlfriends saturn has a cooling system with an aluminum radiator & heater |>core. It seems to need flushing. Its already been flushed by a mechanic |>with the reccomended standard flushing additive. Still not much heat. |>Dex-cool was the coolant used prior to this problem. I need advice on an |>alternative cleaner that wont dissolve the system. | |It's probably air-locked. That means there is a big bubble of air in |the system that the water pump can't move. In severe cases the air |bubble will cause the water pump to cavitate- to mix the air and water |into foam. Foam won't cool the engine. | Newer cars have very specific methods of removing the air from the |cooling system. Get the shop manual, follow the procedure, and hope |you haven't roasted the engine. And get a new mechanic.
While you are rooting around under the hood, make sure you don't have debris trapped between the front of the radiator and the back of the AC condenser. Rex in Fort Worth
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