Cheap Car Heater Fix at Home

it's cold outside and if you go to turn your heat all the way to heart and you turn up the fin and it still just doesn't blow anything but cold air or lukewarm air there's a couple of reasons that it could be let's talk about that the most common reason that I find I've been a mechanic for decades is that the coolant slope if you have a leak in your cooling system it can cause air to build up and accumulate in your heater core you see these two hoses going into the cabin that's where your heat comes from the antifreeze gets pumped by your water pump in this case it's in the middle clear down there but the water pump pumps the fluid throughout the engine and cools it off and it also uses that hot coolant to go into the cabin into a tiny little radiator about you know graphically about this big and then that tiny little radiator has a fan called a blower motor that blows the heat through that little mini radiator radiates the heat into your cabin so if you don't get heat or if the temperature quality isn't great there's a good chance that there's air in there because you have air in your cooling system to make sure it's full up to this RIM this inner rim that you see here and if you have a bottle make sure that you fill it up to the line you can see that this one has a line right here for the minimum and maximum look for that if it's up to the max cold and you're good then that's not your problem if that's not your problem you might have stop leak or some other kind of garbage stuck in that little mini radiator that heater core so this video is going to be about how to clean and flush all that junk out the first step is to drive the vehicle get it up to operating temperature so that the needle is somewhere in the middle between hot and cold or that little blue temperature light goes out or something to indicate that you've driven long enough the next thing you do is grab those heater hoses which one pod is at this one or this one if you find that in this case this one was hot then that's the one that has antifreeze being pumped in and then the one that's cold is the what the output or the outlet side what I did is I back flush it I want to go backwards that's a hot antifreeze is not getting in this side I want to send cleaner and hot water in through this to do that I've got a couple of hoses here I've got one that's about four feet long and it's connected to a transmission fill funnel that fits into a 5/8 inch hose and a zip tied to the hood if you have lift struts or something other than the stick and you want to make sure that you put a stick or something to hold the weight at the end if you don't want hot water being poured into this and then you're worn out lift stress like collapsing and having this pour hot water over you so watch out for that so I've got this funnel and every hose hooked up to the output side so it's going to go in there if you're a little confused or you're not sure sometimes you can even just pull the hoses off and look and see which one looks like crap in this case it's the one that was hot you can see all the corrosion on that so make sure that the the input side becomes the output side we're back flushing this thing is what we're doing and then hook up a couple of those if you buy 10 feet of hose you know this hose isn't terribly expensive can use real heater hose I have some on hand so that's what I'm using so where is this going this goes down to a catch basin you can see right here if I want to see what's coming out of that so the first thing that you do is you hook up your hoses have your catch basin catch whatever antifreeze is in there and the way you do that is you just take the end of this hose looks clean hose and then with all of this setup blow in it take a deep breath and as soon as you put your mouth on that hose you blow as soon as you're out of breath get your mouth off the hose you don't want to breathe the vapors from the antifreeze it's toxic it's bad for you beers toxic that's how you get intoxicated so don't don't what's your parents about being all upset about it either as far as the catch basin once you have all that coolant out of it go ahead and dispose of it handle it do what you're going to do so that you don't contaminate the next batch so get a clean container put it back up in there nothing's in it but air at this point what you want to do is run some hot water through it where do you get hot water well you can get it from your stove I'm a I'm talking boiling hot water water boils at 212 degrees your car's engine temperature the running temperature is about 190 degrees between 185 and 195 so if you run hot water backwards through this thing it's going to knock a lot of that stuff loose so all I was getting all of that set up I've had this big pot of water on the stove getting hot so I'm going to take that pot and we'll go directly to the funnel and pour it into the vehicle as soon as you take this big old pot of water off the stove it's going to stop bubbling but believe you me this is hot it's still a little big deal it's hot water so you fill up your funnel and don't expect it to go down right away be a little cautious be ready to get back off of it but you'll find it a little sit and sit and sit and then all of a sudden you'll notice that it just goes right through another thing to be careful of is that when you heat plastic to boiling water kind of temperatures you're going to find it gets soft so be careful make sure that you don't get burned you know you deal with boiling water after all come on you careful use precaution as it pours through your heater core you'll see this little trickle and flow and do its thing the next thing I do is run some kind of cleaner in there with some hot water I got a whole bunch of this stuff on sale it's just a small bottle you can see compared to my thing it's not like a gallon what is it it is 22 ounces so I'll take this stuff dump it in there and then I'll let it sit while I'm boiling some water and flush it through with a little bit of hot water just to make it sure that I have enough to push through the hose and fill up that tiny little radiator it doesn't hold a whole lot but I'll let that sit I've got to boil a big old pot of water on the stove for the next step so I just let that sit and soak and let that cleaner do its magic now remember when you're filling your pot full of water you don't want it all the way up to the brim the more it full it is the more you're going to spill that first a little bit hard to get in hard to get it to really behave but once you get down a little bit it goes pretty quick and it's easier to pour so if you're worried about spilling or you're a little nervous or you haven't done it before don't fill it more than you have to it's going to increase your risk and Riaan spilling but Laurie gets as you can see it's a lot easier and it's going a lot faster this thing SAP or maybe four or five minutes before it went down the first time I poured this thing was really pretty blocked for why she's been asking me to do this for quite a while I'm really happy to finally get this done before Christmas because it's cold reason you've heard the saying everybody's water works but the plumbers he's out fixing everybody else's you know what to some degree but like take care of her that's what we're doing now the heater core for this if I had just replaced the heater core and what it would be great and it would have worked awesome trouble is the heater core for this it's about for our job and it's a hundred dollars one hundred and thirty dollars to replace it the problem isn't the heater core it's not leaking it's all of the stop leak that some yeah you put in this trying to fix a water pump don't use stop leak this plugs your heater core just it's so frustrating as a mechanic you know for me it's easy to replace the water pumps or somebody else would be a lot more expensive than the Blues our car for the whole day for me it's like two three hours because I know how to do it speaking of which I'll leave a link at the end of the video as well as in the description on how to replace the water pump on this specific vehicle it's so much better to just find the leak and fix the leak you know don't put something that you know indiscriminately plugs everything up you get this now that we've got everything done just like we blew the antifreeze out we're going to blow the water out it's going like this that's pretty good so waters not going to hurt anything at last it's freezing cold in which case you want to get all that water out and replace what was in there with to it or just hook up your hoses and you know be good to go with it what I'm going to do is I'm going to drain the water the soapy water down the toilet basically if there's no antifreeze in it you can always dump soapy water down your toilets no big deal because we're using a lot of volume of soapy water to clean this out that's why we separate our flushes and doing what we're doing with it antifreeze antifreeze does not go down the toilet so much right right go hug a tree would you I will too we'll do it together yay mmm I does this tree so at this point we've got nothing but air in the heater core it's nice and clear so I'm going to take some universal antifreeze and pour that down the funnel until I hear just a little trickle into the clean pan as soon as I hear a clean trickle should be like less than a half gallon there we go so now we've got a heater core that's full of coolant so we don't have a bunch of trapped air just remember what I said if you have a bunch of trapped air that air heats up it expands it creates pressure not to mention that's one of the highest points in your whole cooling system so if there's going to be air it's going to get trapped there so the more you know cut off my zip tie okay so once it's below the level of this and again push a little bit through if you like and just wait for it as I swing this I can kind of feel about where the cue learn is it's about here nurse that through Thank You coolant coming up the other side of it now I've got a drain pan underneath it there to catch the excess so twist this never squish the end of the most you can squeeze this part and twist with pliers or something if you have to but bear in mind this sucker is aluminum or copper which are both soft metals that you don't want to ruin we're trying to save the heater core not destroy it right we'll take our other heater hose off and see we're not spilling very much you're not creating some big environmental disaster here we're catching our coolant we're just goes a little bit properly don't oh most Peter cores don't care which way the coolant goes they really don't so you can switch it through and keep on flushing as you run your heater or put it back the way it was all good things so this is the one that goes into the heater core this is the one that comes out of the heater core amazing one more trip here because there's no heater valve check valve anything love this system I'm going to reverse these so it constantly that flushes now but twist them over it's not going to hurt anything on this vehicle if you find that you've got a big old mouth with hoses going in and out of it vacuum line or a little electronic dashpot kind of thing on it let's do this but for this vehicle I'm just going to keep on keeping on back flushing this get further made clean so as I put my hose clamps back on make sure that I tug on them so it's you know like spring loaded houseplants are kind of screwing because you know they're great they keep the attention on but you got a pen preload them if you can match where it was on the hose that helps to but basically I'm just binding them down on the hose I twisted them the way that they don't want to go so the next thing I'm going to do is revisit this here top off the coolant I'll run it long enough for the thermostat to open up and then let all the hair come up to here and then I'll fill it again cold and then the heat will be great you want to see what we got out of this let's go check it out so this Pam is totally clean when I started the process when I drain the coolant out that was one batch and I'm sure there was more garbage in that but once I started doing cleaner and boiling hot water and then cleaner again soapy water this is what I got you see there's still a little soapy water in there but that is stop leak when you look up close of this stuff there's a little bit of rust particles but for the most part it's copper what do you call it bars leak I mean I can even tell you what brand it is somebody put a bunch of bars leak in it just wound up blocking the heater cord and it didn't fix the leak so nothing against bars leak you know like if you had a leak in a radiator this works if you have a leak in a heater core it might work but if you have a leaky water pump that's a rubber seal no way in heck this is going to seal that so I've got this filled up you can see this overflowing a little bit I've got to catch basement underneath it just basically need to make sure you're down to that lower level if it pull up to there you're good employee there we go okay don't leave a link in the description for the cleaner the cap hose you can buy in bulk all that kind of stuff as we link in the description but at this point we run the vehicle of the day so service that opens what the thermostat opens it will belch up a bunch of air will let the vehicle cool down everything will recompress from expanding being hot and then we'll top it off cold make sure it's hold of the cola line on the overflow bottle make sure to pull up to the rim of the radiator cap once we've done that after it's run the thermostat belts up a bunch of air we're just going to be in great shape so I'm revved it up got this words that operating temperature I've got the heater on it used to be that you're like wondering you know is this hot or cold I can't really tell it's hot now like if you leave your hand there it will be uncomfortable so so I didn't replace the heater core all I did is flush all the crud out of it so it gets good flow thanks for watching be sure to check out some of these other videos here's the video on how to do the water pump on this vehicle here's to another video on how to flush your super clean a heater core there's lots of ways to do this lots of ways to get the same job done you can do it wrong and mess up a bunch of stuff that upset here and still have a good result so don't be shy go for it

Channel: briansmobile1

Views: 1,525,623

Keywords: Cheap Heater Fix at Home, flush, boiling water, backflush, clean, stop, leak, stopleak, not hot, quit, working, blows cold, briansmobile1, thank you, automotive, how-to, how, to

Id: O_pumyrjngg

Length: 14min 56sec (896 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 15 2017