Ptipon
(Ptipon, Sonora, CA, USA, 1990 XJS, Conv.)
21
Oh yeah. Ocean water has all salts imaginable and will therefore attack almost anything, even aluminum.
Also has anyone ever noticed the scaling and deposits around home water fixtures and faucets. That’s the same crud that deposits in an engine and practically glues/welds parts together. Ever notice how hard it is to remove from faucet, fixtures, pots and pans? It can’t even be scraped or chipped off. What is need is a solvent like lime away with many treatments and many hours to dissolve it away. All one has to do is take a pan full of water and boil all the water away. Those deposits will be there in the bottom of the pan. That’l give one a fair idea of how polluted with minerals their tap water is.
Don’t trust your water unless you do this simple boiling test. You can also take that as an indicator of how healthy your tap water is.
Ptipon
(Ptipon, Sonora, CA, USA, 1990 XJS, Conv.)
23
All depends on what salts and how much of those salts are dissolved in the water. There is a point where the type of salt and/or the amount of a salt are deadly. This includes table salt, NaCl. Many sources of drinking water have arsenic and with too much of that, the water has to be cleaned of that before it is potable. This is true of many water sources that are used for bottled water.
I just looked at the gallon jug, they do not have the % on it, I got it at Home Depot. The TR6 cooling system holds one and a half gallons so I pulled the bottom hose to drain coolant, and was able to put the whole gallon in, I did also need to add water so my guess would be a little over 50%. I got the new water pump today and put it on the car. We timed it with the air cleaners on and let it idle for at least 30 minutes, no overheating. I still plan on doing this to my car when I can get to it in a few weeks.
I had a plastic thermostat housing fail on a car once. Thermostat stuck closed and warped the housing, but when I pulled it off the area around the seal was packed with limescale that had built up and helped crack the plastic. I can well believe it could clog a radiator. Seeing the state it was in put me off ever using tap water in any car.
Where I live the water is super hard. It all runs off Salisbury plain so it’s more chalk than water.
If you’re looking to clean out the cooling system and are concerned with acid, why not just use water with a low or non-existent TDS (Total Dissolved Solid) content such a distilled or reverse osmosis water? It WILL leach away any mineral deposits. It just takes some more time, though not as much as you’d expect if it’s really clean water.
I’ve done this with satisfactory results in the past for not-too-bad systems, you just have to do it a lot to get a substantial amount out.
The downside is that it’s going to take a while depending on how much you drive the car (the heat of a running car will speed up the transition). You also risk corrosion for some surfaces if it’s left too long as there’s no inhibitor as there is with a 50/50 mix. It also won’t do much for rust as it doesn’t do the same thing as acid.
I’d only use the water for a week at a time before draining and refilling. water wetter or something of the sort will help keep the TDS low and will serve to lubricate the water pump as well as act to prevent rust, though it will slow things down.
If you want to know it’s working- A cheap TDS meter will definitely show results with before and after readings of the water.
Obviously, you don’t mix with coolant when doing this and you shouldn’t do this if freezing is a concern.
Water will always leave or take up surrounding minerals depending on the mineral saturation index. If you keep water with low dissolved solids in there, it’ll take up whatever it can until it reaches equilibrium, though this take a long time as the transition gets slower as it gets closer.
*you MAY also notice the car running cooler with a nearly all water mixture as it conducts better than coolant mix, that’s why many racers usually use water with some additives instead of a 50/50 mix. (they also don’t care about freezing as those cars are never left outside; they’re in for trouble if they leak 50/50 on a track)
Ptipon
(Ptipon, Sonora, CA, USA, 1990 XJS, Conv.)
28
The absolute best to use is DI water or de-ionized water. It is an extremely good solvent for any and everything. It has been used by the semiconductor industry for about 60yrs because it’s so good and does not leave a residue of anything. You can get it on Amazon now pretty cheaply and get less than 10ppm or you can by a DI water maker. Nothing beats it as a solvent and it leaves zero residue of its own. Exactly what Zack is saying below.
Ill respectfully disagree (having worked in a geochemical lab).
This was a write-up a geochemist colleague wrote, some time ago.
"If you have an ohmmeter it is pretty easy to check how ionized your “water” is. All the grocery store distilled bottles I’ve checked have been quite non-conductive. Certainly more than good enough for engine coolant use.
Deionized water can contain uncharged non-water molecules, while distilled water should just be H2O (and some HO- and H3O+)".
(Those uncharged molecules make DI water very aggressive, in multi-metal cooling systems.)
“In other words, distilled water is a superior subset of deionized water–not the other way around.”
1 Like
Kirbert
(Author of the Book, former owner of an '83 XJ-S H.E.)
30
I’ve never had any luck with Lime A Way. Now, The Works toilet bowl cleaner, now that’ll get the crud off!