Thread: the coke bottle cooling system fill.

first prep your bottle, ok, this ones not a coke bottle its a coles budget 1.5l water bottle but near enough remove the cap and then the little security ring that normally holds it on. Dont ask, just trust me its a pain to fish it out of the cooling system later.

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cool

now fill it up and invert it into the expansion tank and it'll go glugity glugity glugity as it puts a measured 1.5l into the cooling system by changing water for air.

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By this stage you should know how much goes in your cooling system and at what concentration you need to have your coolant at. so with the first 1.5-3 l of fresh water in the system add your concentrated coolant to get the dosage level you want. Of course this does assume that when you emptied the system out you had the forethought of flushing the system with distilled water until it was flowing cleanly before dumping all the distilled water out that you could.

now add more water and eventually you'll hit an equilibrium point

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when that happens pull the bottle out fill it up again and make sure that the water level is higher than the next highest point in the cooling system (the heater hoses in a tdi deefer)

then start it up, give it 30 seconds or so at idle while you inspect for obvious leak then give it high idle with a blanket over the front of the grill to retard airflow.

and you'll notice this.
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the concentrated coolant heated by the engine circulating up into the water bottle. (ok coke bottle if your doing it right) sometimes its got plenty of bubbles and the level will drop below that of the highest point, if it does just refill the bottle and tip it in again.

when that stops bubbling air in keep the revs on and check by hand the temperatures at the thermostat housing (dont do that on the TD5, you will loose an arm to the belt use the port on the top of the engine on the passangers side where youd expect the thermostat to be) top and bottom radiator hoses, and the heater hoses, have the heater on flat out so you can check that its flowing correctly as well. Once the engines warmed up you'll notice a fairly rapid change in the color of the water in the bottle

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when it looks like its changed as much as its going to remove the bottle, cap the cooling system, cap the bottle and then move the vehicle to a dry patch of concrete to check for leaks let it idle for 5 minutes or so then take it for a drive checking the engine for leaks at the 10, 50 and 100Km marks be sure to vary your driving over the range to expose the system to the full range of operating conditions.

when you get back the system should have purged any excess coolant and now be at the right level, grab a paint pen and mark the side of the expansion tank and use that as your warm coolant level indicator, then in the morning while its cooled down mark the bottle again for the cold mark.

done and dusted, as a bonus you have about 1l of ready to use premixed coolant in a convenient bottle and if you had any contamination in the system you'll have signs of it in a ready to analyze container.

the purity of the water, depending on where you live you might have water with additives in it that dont react well with the metals or coolant in the system.