Coolant type

Not saying I'm not retarded though, I was dumb enough to not check the gasket on a 270k mile car when I bought it, but I didn't even know how to drive a manual back then.

bottled water? Why not use distilled water???

Also, did you just refill the coolant or do a complete flush? Squeeze the upper radiator hose with the cap off the radiator... kinda burp it

Wouldn't it have just been easier just to Google search "mk1 Miata coolant type"?

The answer is green anyways

Used to be green was copper/brass and orange was aluminum. I think they're more interchangeable now

Thanks guys, I've never flushed my coolant before. Pep boys has distilled water rite?

>bottled water
That has minerals and calcium in it. You should use distilled water. Technically, there are enough additives in coolant that you can get away with using low mineral non-polluted tap water. But the best water you can use to mix coolant is tap water. A lot of coolants are pre-mixed ready to use nowadays, and don't need water to be added. It'll say so on the label.

Originally, colors were significant. But then greedy asshole companies started saying theirs mixed with any coolant and they colored their product the same color as the dominant selling product at that time. Pretty soon, the various colors became a jumble as some companies picked a color for their product that didn't even correspond.

But then sometime after 2000, it seemed the companies stopped trying to make their own niches with colors and now the generic ones seems to be green. I still don't trust any coolant other than the official one though.

>Head gasket looks p good
Head gaskets fail inside the engine because the gasket seals between cylinders, oil passageways, and coolant passageways. Some of those separations are pretty thin.

It dosnt mater I've used swamp water to get out of a pinch but realistically get a cool color clear tubeing and led lights and build it like a PC

I always thought that the difference is that old engines with an iron block needed the green coolant and the newer engines with aluminium blocks/parts needed the violett one. I always use Glysantin.

One of the best populist articles about ICE coolant/antifreeze is:

autoserviceprofessional.com/article/92419/coolant-and-colors-what-are-car-makers-up-to

Example of mixing coolant colors:
youtube.com/watch?v=C6j9jQYx6Fs

Not the user you replied to, but my mother always buys 15-17 y/o shitbox euro cars, think punto-tier shit. They're already at the end of their lives and she just pours in tap water, and complains when the radiator clogs and the water pump just dies kek

>Pep boys has distilled water rite?
The cheapest source of distilled water is a supermarket. A lot of these types of stores sell one gallon jugs of both drinking water and distilled water at 99 cents each. My local Winco sells filtered drinking water at 79 cents per gallon and distilled water at 99 cents. The local kroger brand is 99 cents for either.

Heh, some people might think the more expensive water is best for the car. So they pour in their Perrier mineral water. Mineral water. Mineral..... Blah.

>was wondering what coolant to put in it.
Consult your car's owner manual if you still have it? I guess the label from 1996 has worn off by now, but many manufacturers have downloadable owner manuals at their website.

doesn't matter, but watch out because some of coolant types can't be mixed together. afaik some kind of more or less flawed rule of thumb says blue one can be mixed with anything

>all of those water posts
you can mix it with water, but if water/coolant ratio will become too high there will be a risk of it freezing, and that's something you really, really don't want to happen

Distilled water is acidic as the pH would be zero

your coolant system is not holding pressure
check for leaks and make sure the rad cap is good.

>>bottled water
>That has minerals and calcium in and
blaaa blaaa blaaa blaaa

fuck off. There are fucking shit cunting tons on minerals in the block and radiator that turn your distilled water into regular water as soon as it hits your coolant system.

>Distilled water is acidic as the pH would be zero
Distilled water is approx pH 7 which is considered neutral.

>check for leaks and make sure the rad cap is good.

I miss those days when it was possible to open the radiator cap and use a bulb to suck out some fluid and put it in a glass container to see if it was dirty and needed to be drained and replaced. The only cap that exists is the one on the overflow container.

If you're really paranoid, go to the dealer parts desk and get the offishul coolant.

Otherwise, like a lot of people have said, just make sure you don't mix different brands. Drain all the old stuff out and put in new stuff that's all the same.

What happens if a little bit of mercury is added into the overflow tank? Will it slosh around enough to get sucked back up into the radiator?

Look who failed chemistry class. The pH of water is the set point of neutrality.
[H3O+] = 1.0x10^-7
pH = -log(1.0x10^-7) = 7

>not using Zerex pink for your asian car
When that shit is half the cost of the factory coolant, its a no-brainer

>When the chinese coolant is a third the cost of the factory coolant
It's a no brainer

I only use DexCool because it's too easy for the stealership to invalidate my warranty if they see anything they don't like. Getting rid of warranty increases their profit because they make more money doing the same task out of warranty.

There is only one source calcium residue in your engine can come from. It's water containing calcium.
Look at any water-heating appliance in your home. It'll have a degree of calcium residue that is based upon usage-frequency and level of calcium in your tap water. Assuming you use your car for hours per day/week it's quite fucking relevant to minimize the amount of calcium that can settle.
Your body NEEDS calcium. Living things want as much calcium in water as possible. (within reason)
Bottled water will aim to have as much calcium in it as (economically) possible.
Distilled water has the least.
regular tap water is in between.
Better to go with distilled water. Might settle for tap. Using bottled water is lunacy as it is both more expensive and equally bad or even worse than tap water.
How the fuck did you become so arrogant with zero knowledge of what you're talking about?!

Don't post maid marian

>There are fucking shit cunting tons on minerals in the block and radiator
Just because things are not ideal elsewhere doesn't mean I should give up trying to be good to the car. I see no reason to not use distilled water as that is the cleanest source. I don't want the additives in the coolant to wear out sooner.

There is another problem evident in your post that is separate from the issue of coolants. That is the tendency of people to justify not taking care of the car by saying things are not ideal, or the engine is old, etcetera. If anything, a wounded car needs more care and not less care if you want it to keep going. In some past threads, I've seen where people WANT to keep the old car going, but now justify giving it less care as it is old. A wounded engine gives up even sooner under poor care.

What did he mean by this

None of us dare to use chinese coolant even if it's 1/3 the cost. So that post is a punny joke which means you have no brains if you use chinese coolant even at 1/3 the price of oem coolant. Chinese companies are notorious not only for not meeting spec, but even if they meet spec on what's listed, they cut corners on everything else including how much buffer (aka colloquially and improperly referred to as "headroom") there is to prevent corrosion.

A poster in the windshield wiper thread at joked about how chinese silicon rubber is sometimes rubber that had silicone lube spray squirted on it. So it's hard to consistently trust chinese products due to so very many shenanigans. The product that is good today might be changed tomorrow. Or the supplier had a stock of counterfeited chinese products as many chinese companies counterfeit each other. One actually good chinese Li-Ion battery product is counterfeited by at least seven other chinese companies who even print the same labels and shipping packages.

Road related chinese product:
5newsonline.com/2017/07/04/kenyas-12-million-bridge-collapsed-weeks-after-inspection/

depends on how cold the places you want to go to are
the amount of glycol to use per water is well known

complex is any further ingredienten that claims to reduce corrosion of the metals or seals within the engines cooling system
.eg copper aluminium iron rubber silicon
any of this extra chemical can react badly with any of the parts inn the cooling system that it touches

either find out what metals and such are inside your cooling loop
and then make your own custom mix of chemicals

or trust that the car maker has already done this
and that the coolant they recommend will work ok

assume third party makers have only the motive to sell their product and trust no review
verfy the clams of a positive review
but pay much more attention to what they do not say

if you do find a negative review
look to the cause of the clam they make

50/50 mix of dexcool and normal green antifreeze.

If you have DexCool, you might as well use 100% of the premixed DexCool for your GM engine. If GM had wanted any xxxx glycol, they would have added it.

You're supposed to do 50% water, 50% ethylene glycol (antifreeze)

To all the retards who say just water enjoy your frozen broken pipes

>To all the retards who say just water enjoy your frozen broken pipes

They're also increasing their rust whether it be winter or summer. If the rust compromises some of the narrow areas where gasket seals are located, then the high pressure gases in the cylinder might push through the areas of the gasket seal weakened by rust or electrolysis.

>I'm thinking the shitty coolant they had at jiffy lube mixed with the bottled water
If it's a new GM car, then it should have DexCool and not some other generic coolant that is missing the additives that causes it to be incompatible with other color coolants. The other problem with different colors is that if you take it in to a stealership, they might note in the computer that non DexCool fluid was used. The warranty requires that the car owner perform prudent maintenance as well as not improperly maintain the car. My chebby stealership likes to look for anything different and invalidate the warranty. They know how to remove the magic good feeling of the 3 year bumper to bumper warranty.

>You're supposed to do 50% water, 50% ethylene glycol (antifreeze)
All the ones on the shelf are pre-mixed ready to use. It's been a long time since I've bought anything that needed me to add water. Maybe switching to pre-mix was their way of keeping the price the same (50% net inflation).

>Look at any water-heating appliance in your home. It'll have a degree of calcium residue that is based upon usage-frequency and level of calcium in your tap water.
>Assuming you use your car for hours per day/week it's quite fucking relevant to minimize the amount of calcium that can settle.

Why are you comparing an open heating system to a closed cooling system.

The context is that It's not quite closed when the car owner keeps adding bottled water to it.

no one ever mentioned topping up.
The amount of calcium in the 2, maybe 3 litres of water used in a standard 50/50 mixed cooling system amounts to fuck all.

you guys go ahead and keep arguing about how deionised is better than distilled or vise versa I'll use my tap water and keep not giving a fuck.

>Bottled water will aim to have as much calcium in it as (economically) possible.
One of the commonly used taste agents added to bottled water is calcium chloride. Not only is that calcium, it is also salt. Putting salt into a hot pressurized water system seems to be a fail. Calcium chloride is also one of the "road salt" ingredients.

i put g12+ in my cars.
its really cheap and good

>no one ever mentioned topping up.
It could even be topped off with the wrong stuff at the service center especially if it is a scamming place. Those shops might pretend to do something like a coolant flush and replacement and then give you the bill for a task they didn't do. CBC Marketplace did an expose documentary for Ontario Canada, and it's on youtube.

What sucks is that the scam chain Economy Lube (of Ontario, Canada) didn't even replace the radiator fluid. They just poured some new fluid into the overflow tank to make it look like new. But the fluid they poured in was green and the actual fluid in the car is orange pink.

youtube.com/watch?v=-avpx8UTakI

So when the investigation team got their cars back from the Economy Lube, they had to fix the problem of the wrong fluid being used. Makes me wonder if Jiffy Lube does upselling services like that. They used three cars at different times to verify that the scamming was consistent and not just a one time accident which is the excuse given when scammers get caught.

cbc.ca/news/canada/oil-change-shop-caught-scamming-customers-marketplace-investigation-1.2418675

don't mix coolants you fucking retard

My scoob was bubbling in the overflow bottle, the headgaskets were blown between the cylinder and coolant jackets like said.

>was wondering what coolant to put in it.
You never have to wonder if you put in the official coolant the manufacturer tells you to use. It's also mentioned in your owner manual.

>not 100% sure
Everyone is sure on one thing - using the cooland or antifreeze the manufacturer recommends is 100% correct. This is not alchemy where you mix purple with yellow and create a magical substance that outperforms everything else ever made.

As others have said, don't mix coolants. They have additives and formulations that are not necessarily compatible. Coolants that can be added to everything lack the additive packages which is why they can be added. But why do you want coolant without additive packages? It would be like buying motor oil without the additives that make it great.

Jiffy Lube has been known to put the wrong coolant into the car as some other forum posts have mentioned.

What other service shop chains are known to put in the wrong coolant or cheat on basic services like coolant flush?

>I'll use my tap water and keep not giving a fuck
For something as simply as using distilled water, I think the effort is worth it. It's also why I would never allow chain shops like Jiffy Lube to flush or add coolant. They probably save every penny they aggressively can due to their greedy franchise owners. So they'll use tap water and in drought areas, that will probably be ground water instead of fresher snow melt river water. That ground water will have a higher mineral content than if there was no drought in that area.