Last night driving to work, after aboubt 10 minutes on the road, I noticed that my heat stopped working while the fan was still blowing. I turned off the fan, waited about 10 seconds then turned it back on. The heat worked normally for about 1-2 minutes then stopped, the fan still operated normally. I then noticed that the car's temperature was going down, from about 190 to less than 170 degrees. I played around with the fan switch again with no luck. I turned the fan off at this point. I then noticed that the car's temperature had climbed above 200 degrees and kept climbing until it went into the red and the overheat message came on. I turned on the fan and the temperature went down enough to extinguish the overheat message but still stayed near the overheat area. I stopped the car at a nearby gas station and opened the hood, with the car still running. I could hear the radiator boiling and saw antifreeze dripping on the ground coming from underneath on the pasenger side. I looked underneath with a flashlight, saw anti-freeze in that area. I did see anything leaking from the block. I had the car towed home and intend to look at this today, Dec. 4th. Also, the car ran fine during all of this, no stumbling, roughness etc. I am the original owner of this car. It has 236,700+ miles on it and its cooling system was professionally converted to green from dexcool at around 180,000 miles. It does have a small antifreeze leak coming from the back of the intake gasket that requires I add fluid every couple of days or so. This car is driven 3000 highway miles a month. Any help on this problem would be greatly appreciated.
It sounds like your water pump is shot. The small antifreeze leak is the coolant probably coming from the weep hole on the water pump. If you ran the car while the temperature was up, you may have to watch the head gaskets from now on as they may be shot. Water pumps wear out around 100k to 150k miles usually.
Thank yuo for your reply. While troubleshooting the car today I could not duplicate the problem. The car did not overheat nor were there any leaks. I felt the radiator hose by the waterpump with the idle up (block on accelerator) and cou;ld feel the water circulate. I hate it when you cannot duplicate a serious problem. Right now the car is going to have to sit until I can dedicate more time to try and figure out what is wrong. Thanks again.
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Correction: I DID NOT see anything leaking from the block. Also, there was nothing leaking inside the car.
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