Coolant temperatures while towing

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Supercharged111

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Red Line and similar products are surfactants meaning they reduce the surface tension of the liquid they're put into which allows the coolant/water to make better contact with the engine's innards which is what helps it cool. I've never researched those products from the perspective of which type of water they best with. Probably worth nerding out over.
 
AuroraGirl

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1998_K1500_Sub said:
Yes, and Redline also says:

"Rust and corrosion protection allows for use of straight water"

which suggests they've an anti-corrosion additive pkg.
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id never use straight water even with the claim you could. I know whats in my water, how exactly is redline going to keep the lime and calcium from building up on something?
 
1998_K1500_Sub

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AuroraGirl said:
id never use straight water even with the claim you could. I know whats in my water, how exactly is redline going to keep the lime and calcium from building up on something?
Click to expand...

Yup, that's my concern, for any additive... Redline's or any antifreeze concentrate.

The magnesium & calcium carbonates / sulfates, total dissolved solids, sodium if it's softened... I don't want them in my cooling system.
 
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AuroraGirl said:
id never use straight water even with the claim you could. I know whats in my water, how exactly is redline going to keep the lime and calcium from building up on something?
Click to expand...

It's a risk you take in certain applications. A street driven car is not one of those applications in my book. I can say the iron block will still rust with the surfactant. In the winter I fill with antifreeze and can at least not corrode then.
 
AuroraGirl

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Supercharged111 said:
It's a risk you take in certain applications. A street driven car is not one of those applications in my book. I can say the iron block will still rust with the surfactant. In the winter I fill with antifreeze and can at least not corrode then.
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I mean, ive used water from a literal crick (small creek if you arent familiar with regional word meaning, so a brook would be another word for it) on the side of the road on the way to work. I forgot to bleed the system in my park avenue (3800) and needed to add as i had lost some with it getting hot. Made it!

Replaced it a couple days later. It was pretty clean visually, and I used a chemical flush that smelled like bacon to do the flush.
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AuroraGirl

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1998_K1500_Sub said:
Yup, that's my concern, for any additive... Redline's or any antifreeze concentrate.

The magnesium & calcium carbonates / sulfates, total dissolved solids, sodium if it's softened... I don't want them in my cooling system.
Click to expand...
being they are all minerals that like to coat the clean/bare/ready to accept them metal that they flow constantly over, and minerals dont have good thermal conductivity.
We got a john deere lawn mower with liquid cooled system in 2021, and I had to spend a lot of time removing the mineral scale that coated the entire cooling loop. Thick white powdery looking coating that i assume came from someone using green antifreeze + rural harsh tap water, I cant remember how but I think i determined it was calcium carbonate somehow.
 
South VA

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1998_K1500_Sub said:
I thought the issue was NEVER to run ANY water as a stand alone coolant w/o some sort of additive package to provide corrosion protection and/or anti-cavitation protection (to name at least two). Check me if I'm wrong.

A third-party additive package, RedLine's WaterWetter, is to be used with water. It provides additives but no "antifreeze" (glycol).

Finally, certain antifreeze additives (Sebacic Acid, and others) can only be mixed with distilled water. This is why certain coolant formulations (Honda's, Toyota's) come pre-mixed, i.e., because the additive package can't tolerate being post-mixed (by the end-user) with hard water. This is discussed in Prestone's Patent 5741436, here: https://patents.google.com/patent/US5741436A/en, where they say:

"Sebacic acid and higher di-carboxylic acids, tend to have poor solubility in antifreeze formulations using hard water."



See the Motor Magazine articles, the second one (below) talks about hard water.

Coolant Confusion: It's Not Easy Being Green ... or Yellow or Orange or ...​

https://www.motor.com//magazine/pdfs/082004_04.pdf


Relearning the Alphabet: Making Sense of the Cooling System Scene
https://www.motor.com/magazinepdfs/082010_08.pdf

Both these should be required reading for any shade tree mechanic, IMHO.
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Those articles were very informative. Thanks for posting them.
 
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Just to follow up on trans temp monitoring discussed earlier in the thread:

I ordered this OBD2 bluetooth dongle, which uses the ELM327 chip (supposedly a good thing):

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It doesn't come with its own app, so I'll try DashCommand, per @Caman96 's recommendation.
 
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