cooliing system maintenance

[J Beyer]

How often is the coolant changed in your liquid cooled mills and what do you use for coolant mix in you part of the country?

JB

[Mark M]

Hi JB

Most of my experience is with heavy duty diesels. The coolant should be changed every 2000 hours or 200,000 miles if using conventional coolant. Extended Life Coolant such as Caterpillar ELC (I work for a Cat dealer) will run much longer - 12000 hours (off road equipment) or 600,000 trucks.

If you don't put that many hours on the engine you should change it every 2 years. This would problably be a good interval for gasoline engines.

If you are using a diesel make sure you add the coolant additive (SCA) at approximately 200 hours. This will prevent corriosion, rust, and pitting of the liners.

For more info on cooling systems, coolants, and problems you can visit a web page I set up at http://www.butler-machinery.com/oil.html - go there and look for the Coolant link.

Hope this helps

Mark


I forgot to mention - you should generally use a 50:50 mix of distilled water and antifreeze concentrate (even it in never gets cold where you live). This provides freeze protection to -34F and good boil protection. If you are in an really cold climate you may have to go up to 65-70% but it may be necessary to increase the size of the radiator because a strong glycol mix doesn't transfer heat as well and you may experience over heating.