How do you diagnose a fluid leak?

How do you diagnose a fluid leak? Welcome to Mercie J Auto Care where compassion and craftsmanship come together. I'm Rick Smith, master certified technician.

First of all, I’d like to tell you that fluid leaks can be really challenging and so a lot of people spend a lot of money and don't solve their problem. So there is a process that we like to go through. Some of it depends on what kind of a leak it is but let’s just talk about general oils, power steering fluid, transmission fluid.

The best thing is you have to be able to get access to a good visual, which is one of the challenges because we have so many components that can be covering the source of the leak. So the best thing is if we can have a leak that we can see that has some sort of a dye in it. For example, coolant or radiator fluid whatever you wanna call it it typically has a dye in it and so if we use a black light with some special goggles boy, it shines up really bright and you can really trace it down. Engine oil we might have to put some dye in it, power steering fluid the same and Transmission fluid the same as well. Some cases we might want to put the system under pressure and see if the leak shows up. In some cases we need to pressure wash it all off, fill it up and actually the car has to be driven and maybe might even as long as a week.

Some leaks show up very fast because they’re under pressure. Some leaks take a little bit longer because they’re more like oozing out. So the black light method is the best way if we can get a good solid visual on it. Then there’s a number of different technique to try to force it to leak so that we can find it and then lastly, we sometimes have to remove parts in order to get a look at it.

So leak diagnosis can be a little bit more time-consuming that you might think but it’s better to spend a little bit money to get it diagnosed rather than shoot from the hip. Thanks for watching until next time. Safe travels. Blessings to you.