Warmer weather means time to check cooling systems

WASHINGTON — As days get longer and temperatures creep back up, Ross Auto & Muffler’s Andy Ross starts to see an influx of clients in need of inspections to their vehicle cooling systems.

What many drivers don’t realize is that the systems which cool their car are barely related to those that cool the driver, despite their proximity to one another under the hood.

“They share a space in front of the radiator, that’s about as close as they get,” Ross said. “It’s two separate systems that you have to maintain … they don’t share a fluid, they don’t share anything else.”

Those systems have radically different maintenance needs. Air conditioners, for example, require specialized equipment to check on, but are more or less straightforward to fix.

“The air conditioning system, there’s not a dipstick, there’s not a cap, there’s no way to check whether or not it’s full of the proper Freon,” Ross said. “If you don’t think it’s cooling enough, you take it somewhere … we have highly specialized leak detection equipment to find that stuff.”

Engine cooling systems, on the other hand, are more intuitive, at least in the problem detection phase. Any driver with a manual can check their levels of freeze and boil protection, for example.

If there’s a problem brewing, large swings in engine temperature are an easy-to-notice red flag. So is the tried and true method of looking for anything wet.

Coolant leaks are often visible under the hood, if not on the pavement of a parking space, depending on the level of damage at play.

“The coolant in the engine is a liquid,” Ross said. “We artificially pressurize the system while it’s under running conditions, and (see) if it’s wet. There’s no sensors, there’s no equipment to check for leaks, it’s just visual.”

In terms of maintenance, every manufacturer has different recommendations for engine coolant’s replacement time, usually close to every 100,000 miles.

Repairs and replacements of engine-cooling components, on the other hand, are the opposite of intuitive. With every new generation of car, Ross said the engineering got more advanced.

That means more hours, more training, and higher costs to fix the system in newer vehicles, whether they’re brought to dealership mechanics or independent shops.

“They’re getting more and more complicated every year that they come out,” he said. “There’s a lot of them now, you can’t even see the water pump, it’s buried within the engine. It used to be, back in the good old days, you could change the water pump in an hour or less. There’s some vehicles out there now that’s 16 or 18 hours … it’s not your dad’s car anymore.”

Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com