Losing Coolant? Maybe not...

pretty trades here and today I'm going to show you why you might be losing coolant on your vehicle and what you can do about it and some things to check before you need to take it into the shop to do expensive repairs that might not be necessary and you might not even need to take it into the shop anyways because there's a good chance that you're just not understanding how the cooling system works and the expansion tank so your radiator is right up here in the front of your vehicle and typically most modern vehicles will have also a expansion tank or an overflow tank that isn't connected to the radiator but there's a little tube that goes from the radiator to the expansion tank and basically the the problem is people see that the expansion tank is empty or almost empty at the bottom and they start to freak out and they Panic they think their head gaskets are going bad they think they're losing coolant like crazy and they're worried about their vehicle overheating and that's a very understandable thing to worry about because if you run out of coolant or run low on coolant you can overheat your motor very easily so you want to make sure that your vehicle does have enough coolant now before you take it into the shop to see if it's leaking somewhere check out these simple things you can do on your own to see if you actually need to do that so the first one would be to look underneath the vehicle and see if you see coolant on the ground typically coolant is most of the time it's blue green I've seen some that are pinks or purples as well um so check and see what color fluids are on the ground underneath your car if it's just water it's probably from the air conditioning which again will drip water and condense the water as the vehicle uses the air conditioning so if you just water don't worry about it if you do see coolant leaking it could be the sign of a leak and if it is actually a leak you will need to get that repair you're not seeing any coolant underneath the vehicle check on the expansion tank next now um if you see this icon on something this is not your expansion tank that's for your windshield washer fluid it typically has a picture of a windshield the expansion tank will typically have a plastic cap and that's because the expansion tank is not pressurized and then your radiator here will typically have a metal cap looking something like this it will almost always have a warning on it that says do not open when the vehicle is hot that's because the radiator when it gets warmed up when your vehicle warms up to operating temperatures the coolant heats up and what the radiator does is it keeps the system Under Pressure so that it can't boil the water or the coolant and if you open this when it's hot it's going to spray uh boiling hot coolant out everywhere and probably blind you and burn the crap out of your skin so don't ever open this when your vehicle is warm or hot you need to wait at least three four hours especially if it's warmer out for your vehicle to completely cool down before you take off your radiator cap now the first sign that there's a problem that people usually freak out about is they look at this expansion tank because you can't really see what's in the radiator without taking off the cap and they look in this expansion tank and on the side of it typically it'll have a few lines that say like full or add or low mine says low on it and if you see that it's down by the low Mark people freak out and say oh I need to fill it up with coolant now the reason you don't necessarily need to do that is because this expansion tank is only full when the vehicle is completely warmed up so if your vehicle is cold like right now it's below freezing out so the coolant the volume of the coolant increases when it gets warm camera out so when it gets colder out the volume decreases and the fluid goes down by the low value which is totally fine now the only problem is if your your coolant level here in your expansion tank is down by the bottom and your radiator is not full your radiator should be full when your vehicle is cold so again wait till your car cools down if you've been driving it recently I usually I like to wait overnight and then you can take this off and see if it's full some of them you have to push down on the kind of spring loaded now my radiator is full so that's good so it's not a problem and my coolant level here and my expansion tank is pretty low and that's totally fine so I'm going to put this back on now the problem is if you add coolant to this expansion tank when the vehicle is cold you fill it all the way up when the vehicle warms up and heats up to its full operating temperature the coolant is going to expand a ton and what's going to happen is when this gets full because the coolant will still start to fill up here because the radiator is full and will expand out through this tube is it will just have they have an overflow valve where it will just dump the extra coolant on the ground so it doesn't break your Reservoir so if you fill this all the way up to the full line when it's cold and run it it's probably going to overflow and dump all the cool out on the ground and then the next time your car cools down you'll look and you'll probably see it way down by the low level again so you're like where's all this coolant going and it's just going down on the floor so um as long as your radiator is full and you have some coolant in here coolant expansion tank you are good to go what these really should say is they should say hot and cold and that way you can tell where the coolant should be at when the engine's hot and when it's at a cold temperature from not running for a while and I don't know why they use full and low I think it's just to kind of get people to worry about and maybe take it to the dealer so they can get some service in not sure exactly why they don't say hot and cold some of them do but most don't if your radiator is low and your coolant in your expansion tank is low that's when you know you're losing coolant somewhere and you're going to need to get it checked out further you can also look down in here to look on the trays because a lot of cars have under trays under the motor and they can catch a lot of the fluids in there so look down in here in between this area here and along the bottom of the radiator to see if your vehicle is leaking any coolant from either the hoses here and here and there's some hoses down on the bottom as well so check the hoses check the bottom and the sides of the radiator and a lot of times you'll see like crusty dried up material from it because a lot of time times most of the liquid from your coolant will evaporate leaving some residual residue from the coolant so it might not necessarily be wet it might be dried on there from when it had leaked out earlier the other thing to check too is if your oil in your cooling or mixing that's a very serious problem it's probably a head gasket or it can be a few other gasket issues where the coolant and the oil mix and typically you'll know that because you'll be losing coolant and the other thing is that when you change your oil your oil will be very milky and if you go even if you go and get your oil changed at some place the shop should be able to tell you if you have really milky looking oil it should be just straight black it shouldn't look like a tan or a brown or a Milky looking color like coffee almost

Channel: Kurt of Trades

Views: 65,418

Keywords: Kurt of trades, kurt, coolant, radiator, expansion tank, overflow tank, losing

Id: xQFHUB2Fpe0

Length: 6min 55sec (415 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 20 2023