sorry if this has been asked before i just thought it was product specific and by idling for 20 mins running on water would pose certain problems with lack of forced airflow due to car moving and the high running temps of a zed ok so im looking at flushing my radiator and the flush i got says to use water with it and run the car for 20 minutes, will this pose any heating problems running water or would i be better of running with coolant?
Water will actually take more heat out of the engine than coolant. No problems to be had with what you are suggesting.
i recently gave my zed a radiator flush. just drained all the coolant out, brought 3 bottles of new coolant from nissan (still have 1 left) and ran the car with the hose in it for the 20 minutes. just keep the bottom plug out, i left it in, filled the radiator up then opened it, so it filled and emptied etc. so t cleaned everything. then poured the correct mixture of coolant and water in, and the zed ran 100% better.
If you're going to flush the engine, you may as well dump the coolant and refill with water with the flushing additive in it. Water actually cools better than glycol coolants and you should be able to idle for ages without temp probs. Dump the flush water and continue to flush with water for as long as you can to get as much contaminant out of the system. The real drain cock on the engine block should be used but 9.5 times out of ten the thing is seized and you can never get a full draining. Tap water is just as nasty in cooling systems as it is in car batteries. It allows electrolysis to occur in a multi metal engine like the vg30. Once you have got as much water out of the system that you can, buy plenty of distilled water, it's not that expensive, and refill, run the engine to mix it all up again and dump it again. Then add your glycol based coolant and the prescribed concentration. Glycol coolant raises the boiling point but is not as efficient as water for absorbing heat from the engine. Many full race applications use only water + water wetters which increase the transfer of heat from the engine to the water. Having said that, glycol coolant + water wetter + electrolysis arrestor is the safest formula to look after your engine and in particular your aluminium radiator. You should check for stray voltage and electrolysis voltage in your coolant system by connecting a multi-meter to the neg on the battery and the positive in the coolant without touching the actual radiator. If you get anything over 20millivolts, it means electrolysis is eating your radiator and you need to track down where the current is coming from and fix it.
when i did mine... i pulled the rad. cap off.. also that other cap on the top left of the raid. and put a hose in the top left hole and turned tap on and left the engine running... all the crap came out of the raid. cap hole.. thats what travis told me to do.. got alot of crap out of it.. also got all the rust that was holding my coolant in and water started pouring out like mad..
continue to check your coolant level for the next several days as air pockets get cleared and the level drops....do it when it's cold of course!
ok so i took radiator out while i was changing belts, flushed it with the hose. now got it all back in should this be the procedure i use. - fill with tap water + flush additive - run for 20 mins as prescribed on additive bottle - drain - fill with tap water - run for say 10 mins? - drain - fill with distilled water - run for another 20 mins? - drain - fill with coolant that sound about right to you guys?
over kill but yeah i guess... i just ran mine with water for 20 minutes when the car was already warm with old coolant. drained while filling with tap water until the water exiting was the same color as going in. clear. put the cap in, turned off the car, filled with teh correct mixture of coolant and water. rand for 20 more minutes. refilling the air bubbles as they came out with water. took her for a spin, checked levels. happy as larry.
