Good lord, I hope that the inside of my radiator doesn't look like that. I have always been a bit annoyed that my radiator doesn't have a cap because I would like to be able to visually inspect it from time to time.
Anyway, I changed what I was going to do today. I was going to add a flush with water but I ended up just filling up from the hose. I haven't started this in a while and also had to finish bleeding the air from the power steering system with the motor running, so I had enough things to do without adding a flush. I have had almost all of the hoses off, so I thought I should at least make sure that there were no leaks before I add any flush or coolant. It would be silly to fill it with coolant and then find I had a leak somewhere. I ran it for about an hour today and the temperature looks fine. I had the heat on full and it was nice and hot. I don't think I have a leak anywhere. There were some drips in a couple of places and the level in the reservoir dropped some. I think that was just water I spilled while filling and air getting forced out. I let it cool off and refilled the reservoir. I ran it again for 30 minutes and I didn't see any drips and the level in the reservoir stayed up. I will see again tomorrow.
I find that surprising, distilling water is pretty economical. We have a still at our lab and you can just get distilled water from the tap. There are hot, cold, and distilled spigots. I have never been told that we need to be careful about how much we use, though maybe the amounts are so small that it doesn't matter. I have brought gallons home for various uses here. The plumbing used to be done with copper pipe lined with glass to stop the water from picking up metallic ions but I believe that it's Nalgene or something similar now. The still is about 70 years old and has a copper condenser that is glass coated. The incoming water passes through the condenser to cool it and is then boiled. The steam hits the condenser and phases back to liquid water, minus the impurities. The still needs to be cleaned every so often, more or less like cleaning a coffee maker. The water is pretty clean to start with. It is a very efficient process and scales up pretty well. I would expect the membranes used in reverse osmosis to be more expensive and need to be replaced more often. Maybe scaling distillation to thousands of gallons is harder than I think? The only cost is really energy.
At any rate, what I wanted to make clear is that there is no issue in using distilled water to dilute coolant concentrates. Issues with using distilled water are in using only distilled water in the system with nothing else. In fact, it says right on the Prestone bottle, "water quality is important,
use distilled water only". The bold type there is just what is on the bottle. That's not me yelling at anyone. I would qualify that to say that the packaging should always be read for the manufacturers recommendations. The main issue is that tap water in the US is all over the place as far as what is in there other than water.
Does anyone think there will be an issue in using the
Prestone All Vehicles? I know that many here like Zerex, Peak, or Motocraft.
LMHmedchem