Dear All,

When I purchased my X-Type (year 2003, 3.0 automatic) last summer, there were no heating. My mechanic diagnosed it as a clocked radiator and flushed it successfully, so heating worked fine for last winter. During the spring we replaced almost all heater hoses (1 was ruptured the others were not in good condition), and then a few weeks ago the coolant reservoir cracked. After replacing it, I noticed that there is no heating (I did not use heating in the summer).
The radiator was clocked again.
Is that normal? What can I do to prevent it from happening?

thank you for your help

 

rlazol, this is normally caused by 1 of 2 conditions. The more extreme version stems from someone using a "fix-leak" product on the coolant system. Depending on what you buy, this can have a negative effect on the radiator and lead to clogging. But, for it to happen twice would mean that you would have had to add this product a second time most likely.

The other way is to mix coolants. If you look in the auto parts stores, you will find 3 colors of coolant, green, orange, and red. These are each different and if you mix them, bad things can happen. Normally, you will get some sort of slime to form, that can lead to blockage of channels.

I guess there is a 3rd, but you have to be pretty sloppy to make this happen. If you are under the belief of a little sealant is good, more must be better, then you can have the sealant break off and start plugging up various passages in the coolant system. But, you need to be doing a lot of sealant to have this happen. Granted, if all that you replaced was hoses, then there should have been no need for any sort of sealant use.

 

Dear Thermo!

I am the 3rd pwner of the car. The first one took excellent care of her for 15 years, the 2nd was a sloopy women for 2 years - she may mixed up some stuff.
I dont knowm about any fix-leak. We always used pink coolant. I dont know about the sealant. We did not use it for sure. Maybe the previous owner?
Anyway, thank you for your answer. I will just keep unclugging it and adding the same coolant.

 

rlazol, just to make sure that we are talking the same thing here, are you talking about the radiator getting plugged up or are you talking about the heater core (for heat in the passenger area). These can have 2 completely different effects on the car. If your radiator is getting plugged, that will lead to the car overheating and that can result in some serious out of pocket costs (ie, new engine). If only the heater core is plugging up, then that can be solved a few different ways. Just trying to make sure that I am understanding the situation correctly

 

rlazol

You may have an air pocket. Did you replace the reservoir or have a mechanic do it? If you didn't bleed the air out of the system that may have trapped it in the heater matrix. Also, the heater matrix may have become clogged with debris not removed by the previous flushing. Check the hoses in and out of the heater matrix (remember to turn on the heater-HIGH). Check for temperature differences. If the inlet hose is hot and the outlet hose is significantly cooler; the heater matrix is probably clogged. Have you changed the thermostat? A stuck thermostat (open) could make the heater run cooler than normal. How about the heater control valve?

Good luck!

 

Thermo: OMG, thank you for the clarification, this is the heater core that was clogged for the second time. (I am not a native english speaker, in my langugae that is called the radiator...)
tfloyd01: After my mechanic floshed the heater core last time, he tried to flush all debris. I replaced the reservoir, but I took the car to him a few days later to flush the heater core and he made sure that there was no air pocket. Thermostat and valve were not checked, because the heating became normal once the core was flushed.

The debris that I saw after the most recent clogging were made of tiny orange particles. What can I do to make sure it would not happen again? Can adding distilled water to the collant cause this?

 

rlazol, you talk about orange particles. That has me interested in this even more. The only ways that I can see something like that happening is: 1) something was put into the system that shouldn't have been (can't imagine that), or 2) when the coolant was put into the car, you used concentrated coolant and didn't thin it down. Yes, if you look at the outside of the bottles, some are marked as 50/50 (pre-mix) coolant and others will be marked as "concentrate". The 50/50 pre-mix coolant you just place in the car and no further work is needed. The concentrate coolant needs to be mixed with distilled water (please do not use the water from your faucet, it causes other things to go bad on you). In this case with the concentrate, you mix 1 part coolant to 1 part water (or a 50/50 mix). Running straight coolant (only putting in the concentrate) is not good on the car as it will have a wrong boiling point (will actually make it easier for the car to overheat) and this may be causing the coolant to crystalize, leading to the orange particles that you are seeing. I am making a lot of assumptions here. Kinda like, you need to have a minimum level of coolant in the coolant system (ie, you don't want 30 percent coolant and 70 percent water) as this also lowers the boiling point and also causes the coolant to become ice at a higher temperature (which causes the engine block to crack). So, keeping the coolant at a 50/50 mix as much as practical is best. Worst case, go to where you are running a bit more coolant than water (say a 55/45 mix), that way, if you need to add water in an emergency, you can with no bad effects.

The other thing that I would tell you to do is to clean out the heater core using a "water hammer technique". This sound complicated and like you are going to destroy something on your car, but you will not. What you are doing is putting a little bit of water into the lower part of the heat core. You then use compressed air to push the water through the heater core. The more pressure you can use, the better. You want the water to move through the heater core as fast as possible. What is happening is the water will act like a hammer and free stuff stuck to the inside of the tubing. The water moving and then hitting something that is still is really good at knocking stuff free.