Uncommon Car Overheating Issues
One of our viewers mentioned that he's seen some of my videos on common engine overheating issues, but wondered if I'd be willing to share some uncommon overheating issues. So I thought I'd address that a little bit today. Welcome to Mercie J where compassion and craftsmanship come together. I'm Rick Smith.
So here's a couple of kind of uncommon situations that I run across. I hope you enjoy them. One is you can have a vehicle that, let's say it's a 110 here in Phoenix, and you drive around for 15-20 minutes and the temperature is fine. But you drive it for a longer period of time, let's say 30 minutes or so, and the temperature will hold, hold, and then it'll slowly start creeping up until it overheats. Well, you can have a radiator that's inefficient. So it's working, but it's not working as well as it should because it has certain sediments in it. So that can be a tough one to find.
Then you can also have a scenario where you have an air conditioning condenser out in front of the car and then you have a little bit of a gap and then you have your radiator then you have your fans and then your engine’s back there. Well, you can get a bunch of debris, how about a trash bag or, I'm sorry, a grocery bag could fly up in there or leaves or any debris that can get in between that condenser and that radiator and restrict the airflow.
You can have problems with condenser or fan shrouds, and fan shrouds are missing. You can have some problems with overheating from that as well because the fan is slightly separate from the radiator and it could suck air around the radiator through the fan instead of through it, and that's why we have a shroud.
An interesting one that I had one time was the air conditioning would work fine up till about 35 miles an hour. After that, it didn't work fine. And the reality was, it was programmed to have the fans on up to 35 miles an hour and then after 35 miles an hour it should have the appropriate air flow.
The reason it didn't have the appropriate air flow, believe it or not, was because it was missing some of those plastic shields. You know, you have those splash pans underneath, you have inner fender wells, you have some just all of that stuff, especially on a car like a sporty car that doesn't have much of a grill, we need to direct that air flow where it needs to go to get over those components. And so in this case, it was missing some of those plastic pieces and the air flow wasn't right.
There's also an issue that we can run into with a thermostat bypass. So the thermostat has a sensing element in the bottom of it, that as hot coolant flows by, when it gets to a certain temperature it expands and releases the spring, opens the thermostat and you start to get coolant flow. Well many of those go through the heater core, so a plugged heater core could stop the thermostat from opening.
We also could have a situation where somebody disconnects the heater core and just plugs it off instead of bypassing it, you wouldn't have the thermostat bypass. Some of the European stuff even has a kind of a double bypass system. And so if, I've even seen a scenario where the wrong intake manifold gaskets were put on, and so that coolant does not flow over that sensing element.
Then I'll just throw one more fun one in, we had a truck one time that, when it was pulling horse trailers, it would be fine and then all of a sudden boom, the temperature would spike. Well on that particular truck it had two fans. It had a mechanical fan on the engine. And then it also had an electric fan by the radiator. Well, unfortunately, the electric fan was wired backwards. So as long as the electric fan was off, it cooled ok, but as soon as the electric fan turned on and those two fans fought each other and immediately it overheated.
So there's a few unusual overheating issues. I hope you enjoyed the video. Until next time, safe travels and blessings to you.
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