It was a beautiful 70° day here today and I finally got to replacing my degas bottle.
To summarize my symptoms: the car would overheat any time the outside temp was over 50° or so. There would be coolant leaking behind the front drivers side wheel. Refilling and bleeding would buy me some time but the next day it would be more of the same. Thermostat replacement didn't fix it.
So with the help of a lot of instructions I got from these forums, I changed out the degas bottle.
Some observations and problems:
1. When I drained the radiator, I only got about half a gallon out. Maybe something is clogged. The degas bottle hardly emptied at all. So, when I disconnected its hoses, coolant ran all over the place under the car.
2. Different people who have replaced the degas bottles have disconnected the bottom hose at different points- some at the bottle, and some at the other end of the hose (the replacement bottle comes with a new hose already attached). When I removed the wheelwell liner, I noticed the fastener on the bottom hose was on the complete opposite side of where I could access it. There was no way I was going to get it off with the tools I had. So I had to disconnect it at the other end. That wasn't so bad. The heater block bleed hose was actually more difficult to remove because, once again, the fastener was halfway to the other side and I had a heck of a time getting a tool in there to open it.
3. When I reattached the hoses, I left the preinstalled fasteners on there but didn't use them. I put regular hose clamps on instead. The nipples are long enough to accommodate the extra clamps.
4. When I did the refill and bleed procedure, it took a long long time until I got a steady stream out of the heater bleed. This may be related to the limited drain I got initially. Anyway, there were a lot of spurts coming out, making more of a mess down below.
5. I replaced the fuel filter while I was at it, and wow, it really was easy.
The damage:
The degas bottle had several cracks in it. There's no question that coolant was coming out of there because gunk had built up on the outside around the cracks.
Also, the internal metal siphon tube had fallen down into the bottle. Somebody else on this forum had this same thing happen recently. I don't know what effect that would have, but it can't be good.
I'll take a picture of the old bottle if anybody is interested.
Anyway, I've been driving it around today with no overheating, and no coolant leaks. Many thanks to all the members of this forum who led me to the source of my troubles & provided the info to fix it. I figure for < $150 worth of parts + tools and a few hours of shadetree labor, I saved myself about a week's take-home pay of mechanic's charges.
To summarize my symptoms: the car would overheat any time the outside temp was over 50° or so. There would be coolant leaking behind the front drivers side wheel. Refilling and bleeding would buy me some time but the next day it would be more of the same. Thermostat replacement didn't fix it.
So with the help of a lot of instructions I got from these forums, I changed out the degas bottle.
Some observations and problems:
1. When I drained the radiator, I only got about half a gallon out. Maybe something is clogged. The degas bottle hardly emptied at all. So, when I disconnected its hoses, coolant ran all over the place under the car.
2. Different people who have replaced the degas bottles have disconnected the bottom hose at different points- some at the bottle, and some at the other end of the hose (the replacement bottle comes with a new hose already attached). When I removed the wheelwell liner, I noticed the fastener on the bottom hose was on the complete opposite side of where I could access it. There was no way I was going to get it off with the tools I had. So I had to disconnect it at the other end. That wasn't so bad. The heater block bleed hose was actually more difficult to remove because, once again, the fastener was halfway to the other side and I had a heck of a time getting a tool in there to open it.
3. When I reattached the hoses, I left the preinstalled fasteners on there but didn't use them. I put regular hose clamps on instead. The nipples are long enough to accommodate the extra clamps.
4. When I did the refill and bleed procedure, it took a long long time until I got a steady stream out of the heater bleed. This may be related to the limited drain I got initially. Anyway, there were a lot of spurts coming out, making more of a mess down below.
5. I replaced the fuel filter while I was at it, and wow, it really was easy.
The damage:
The degas bottle had several cracks in it. There's no question that coolant was coming out of there because gunk had built up on the outside around the cracks.
Also, the internal metal siphon tube had fallen down into the bottle. Somebody else on this forum had this same thing happen recently. I don't know what effect that would have, but it can't be good.
I'll take a picture of the old bottle if anybody is interested.
Anyway, I've been driving it around today with no overheating, and no coolant leaks. Many thanks to all the members of this forum who led me to the source of my troubles & provided the info to fix it. I figure for < $150 worth of parts + tools and a few hours of shadetree labor, I saved myself about a week's take-home pay of mechanic's charges.