How to Check and Test Your Coolant/Antifreeze

hey guys chrisfix here today I'm going to show you how to tell when you need to change your coolant in your car or your truck your engine coolant is what circulates through the cooling system to cool your engine so it doesn't overheat the coolant flows from the radiator through the water pump into the engine block where the hot engine gets cooled then it gets pumped out of the engine block through the thermostat back into the radiator as air flows over the radiator it cools the coolant and then the cycle continues typically the coolant runs into your engine via the lower radiator hose and then gets pumped back into the radiator via the upper radiator hose the hot coolant also gets pumped into the heater core where a fan blows over the heater core and that provides heat for you in the cabin for most cars coolant is a 50-50 mix of water and antifreeze the antifreeze lowers the freezing point of water and prevents the engine from freezing and cracking in cold weather at that 50/50 ratio you're protected a negative 34 degrees Fahrenheit antifreeze also raises the boiling point so if the engine does get really hot it won't boil and create air pockets which could cause overheating so at that 50/50 ratio you're protected to 265 degrees fahrenheit and when the engines running the cooling systems pressurized which further increases the boiling point most cars have a pressure limit of 15 psi and the radiator cap has a built-in purge which alleviates the pressure in case of it built higher than that antifreeze also has additives that prevent rust and prevent acid conditions when antifreeze is bad it turns more acidic and has irons which promotes electrolysis and that eats away the metal in the engine and that's obviously bad and bad antifreeze can also degrade gaskets old coolant will also protect less from freezing and boiling now that you know about the cooling system and how it works let's go test it so there are four simple tests that you could do to check your coolant the first test is just a visual test the second test is using a hydrometer for the specific gravity of your coolant the third test is a multimeter test and the fourth test is a pH test you want to make sure that you do all of these tests when the engine is cool you do not want a hot engine we'll start out with the first test and that's the visual test and we're just going to check out the antifreeze so for the visual test we're going to open up the radiator so we're going to check the back side of the cap here and as you can see it's all sludged up which could be an indication that the coolant has gone Edie you want your radiator cap to be clean and not have any sludge on it when looking inside the radiator you could also see there's gunk and buildup and stuff which isn't good and the radiator fluid just doesn't look good in there now you can't always get a good picture from checking out the fluid in the radiator so what we're going to do is we're going to go over and check out the coolant reservoir in some cars you don't have a radiator cap you might just have the coolant reservoir only so just go in here and take a look at the coolant when I first got this truck I got the antifreeze vacuum flushed out and the place refilled it with some cheap antifreeze it's not Dexcool but it is supposed to be orange just to give you an idea I have a clear plastic cup and I'm going to be using a turkey baster just to show you the fluid you get a better look when it's actually outside of the reservoir and when we take a look at this fluid as confirmed from before it does not look good at all I could see a bunch of rust in there and there's debris in there if you have green antifreeze your antifreeze should look green it should be a bright green if you're running red or orange coolant it's a lot harder to diagnose because rust is orange but orange coolant should look bright orange with no debris in it it shouldn't look like this muddy color in either green or orange coolant you don't want any type of muddiness when you pour your coolant back into the reservoir pour it slowly and that'll leave any big rust pieces or debris at the bottom so you can see what's really in there so in my case this obviously fails the visual test on all accounts also don't forget check your owner's manual to see when your coolant should be changed in your car but typically coolant last three years or 36,000 miles and some coolants lasts up to five years and 150,000 miles but it's always good just to do these tests once a year just to give you an idea of how your coolant is doing in my owners manual it says to replace the green engine coolant for the first time at 45,000 miles and then every 30,000 miles after that so that gives you a good idea of the service interval for your coolant now let's move on to the next test the next test we're going to do is we're going to be using a hydrometer to check the specific gravity this test is going to tell us to what temperature the coolant is protecting on both the freezing side and on the boiling side of the temperature scale all you have to do is fill this up to that with coolant and the needle in there will float based on specific gravity to a certain reading and then you just read it I'm going to get the coolant directly from the radiator this time it doesn't matter where you get the coolant from you could get it from the reservoir if you want this is just easier for me so after you fill this all the way to the top there's going to be bubbles causing that the float so you just want to tap until all the bubbles come off of that float in there okay so make sure you get the Celsius and Fahrenheit reading straight the bottoms Fahrenheit so when we go over to our arrow this coolant will protect to negative seven degrees Fahrenheit which is not that great it should be protecting a negative 34 degrees Fahrenheit so negative seven means the coolant is bad we'll flip this over you can see here that the arrow is pointing here 260 degrees Fahrenheit and we're supposed to be protected to 265 degrees Fahrenheit so that's pretty close so we have good boiling protection but we have really bad freeze protection and it's going to get cold this winter so negative seven might not be enough so you definitely have to change out this coolant the next test we're going to do is use a multimeter to see any electrical current that might be in the coolant which will identify any electrolysis so just set your multimeter to twenty DC volts and now I could either go in through your radiator cap or you could go in through your coolant reservoir with the engine off get a reading by sticking one of the leads into the coolant and the other lead onto a ground now you want to see a reading of 0.3 or less if you see a reading of 0.3 or higher you have too much of an electrical current running through your coolant what voltage in your coolant means is that there's an exchange of electrons between metals in your engine and your cooling system which will slowly eat away and corrode those metals so much so that you could actually get leaks in the gaskets and hoses because they won't seal properly anymore right here we're at point two four which is pretty close to point three but this is with the engine off now I'm going to go turn the engine on and we're going to see if that goes above point three which is our threshold for bad cooling so with the engine running at idle I'm going to put the probe in there and you can see it jumped up to 0.3 0.2 7 so it's right on that threshold of 0.3 the higher the reading here the quicker your engine is going to corrode because the coolant is allowing transfer of electrons through it and you don't want that so since the coolant does reach that point 3 threshold just went point 3-1 so it's over the threshold barely so I definitely consider changing the coolant just based on that point 3 reading that we got and also when you combine it with that hydrometer test where we showed the coolant only protects to negative 7 degrees Fahrenheit plus the visual test where there's debris and rust and stuff and it's kind of a muddy color all that combined I would definitely change out this fluid and we're going to do one more test and the final step I'm going to be using these pH tubes this is actually for a fish tank it does pH you could use a pH reader an electronic one and that also tell you the pH we're going to be using a fish tank pH test it doesn't really matter pH is pH and you put the test strip directly into the coolant and then you match the color and it tells you the pH you can buy specific pH testers for your coolant but why go out and buy them when you have them for your fish tank so this is what the test strip looks like before I dunk it the pH is going to be this last one and that's the only thing I'm going to really worry about the rest of them have nothing to do with the radiator it's for fish tank when testing your coolant you want to have a pH reading between 8.5 and 10 so that's basic remember a pH reading of 7 is the middle below 7 is acidic above 7 is basic so a pH level below 8.5 means it's time to start thinking about changing your coolant any pH reading of 7 or below definitely means that you need to change your coolant because the acidic coolant will eat away your gaskets such as your head gasket and also eat away your rubber hoses so all you're going to do is just dunk this into the radiator pull it out so now we just match up our color to the color that's on here and this is more pinkish that's kind of pink orange and then we come down here and it's kind of orange the color of mine is in between 6.2 and 6.3 acidic and I definitely need to change this you do not want acidic coolant but if you get that purple that's a of 8.4 then you're good to go so hopefully this video was helpful and taught you something new about checking your cool if it was give it a thumbs up also if you're not subscribed what you waiting for hit that subscribe button the top tip for this video is always check your owners manual to see what kind of coolant your car uses you never want to mix coolants if you look here on my coolant reservoir it has a sticker that says use the green coolant and do not use the orange coolant in this case they put orange coolant in my truck so I'm going to do a complete coolant flush and get all that orange coolant out and then refill it with green coolant and I'll show you how to do a complete coolant flush I'll put the link to that video in description below along with other coolant videos and also the products I used in this video so go check it out

Channel: ChrisFix

Views: 1,774,875

Keywords: how to test coolant, antifreeze, coolant, how to check coolant, how to check antifreeze, coolant flush, coolant leak, heater core, radiator flush, how to flush radiator, test coolant, test antifreeze, trailers, how to do a coolant flush, heater core flush, engine coolant, overheating, waterpump, why is my car overheating, overheating car, clogged radiator, testing coolant with a multimeter, Specific Gravity (Dimension)

Id: mHTM3dvpD1M

Length: 9min 29sec (569 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 05 2014