Static Test (1) - Cooling System

Took her for another run yesterday, a nice 80 mile round trip, about an hour each way, which is just about right. Looked this morning and once again the coolant was down by about 400ml. Although I can easily live with this I decided I should at least make an effort to track it down. So I covered the area under the car with newspapers, ran her up to temperature and then left her till she had been running for 20 mins. Result later.

I also took the opportunity to plug in my laptop and ran my analysis program to see how the system was behaving. I'm going to cover the results in a number of posts over the next few days so I can describe what happened in some detail.

 

First check was the obviously the cooling system. It worked perfectly (I had topped up the coolant before I started). I also took the opportunity to calibrate my temperature gauge which doesn’t show the actual temperature just the ‘cold zone’, the word NORMAL then the red 'hot zone'. 

 

I found it starts to indicate at about 70°C, it comes out of the ‘cold zone’ at 80°C (this matches with the general advice that you should run above 80°C), then enters the NORMAL zone at 85°C (See picture)

then goes to about the 11:30 position at 95°C when I was pleased to see that my fan kicked in at exactly the right temperature (I have to use clock position as my NORMAL marking has rubbed off). The fan brought the temperature down to 90°C when the fan stopped. I then let it run through a couple of cycles as a final check. The screenshot of my program below shows the results.

So very pleased with the overall result, everything is working correctly at the right time and I am reassured that I don’t need to worry about overheating if I get stuck in a traffic jam.

The result of my newspaper experiment – Nothing, zippo, nada.. No sign of any water, so I am not sure what to try next, apart from living with it.