How to avoid the common summer breakdown: Overheating!
If you haven’t experienced it, I’m sure you have passed someone who has. You’re on vacation, the car is packed to the gills with all you need to make a home away from home. It’s 97 degrees outside, and the humidity is thick and heavy. You notice the car’s temperature gauge is creeping higher than it normally does. You feel your heart begin to race, and beg your car not to overheat now. It’s a weekend and the road is jammed with bumper to bumper traffic. If the car overheats you will have to pull over make multiple phone calls and wait for a tow truck to take you to a garage. Being a weekend you know it’s highly unlikely a garage will be open. Who knows how long you will be stuck in some dinky little town, and you may get taken advantage of, and the icing on the cake is… this is your vacation. You will be wasting precious vacation time getting the car fixed.
If you ever get in this situation there are some tricks you can do to help prevent having to pull over in a place you’d rather not:
- Turn off your air-conditioning and keep it off. The A/C makes the engine work much harder than normal and you want to lighten the load of your poor, over taxed engine.
- Open your windows up all the way, turn the heat on high and switch the control to the vent. I know this sounds like a crazy thing to do when it’s so hot outside, but turning the heat on all the way pulls the heat off the engine and you hopefully will see your temperature gauge begin to drop. The unfortunate side of this trick is that all the heat is going to blow right at you into the cabin of your car.
- If the temperature gauge continues to climb, you want to pull over before the gauge goes into the red, before steam rises out from under your hood or before that red warning light comes on. Once you are into the red zone, you want to pull over right away, turn off the engine and call for help.
- NEVER,NEVER, NEVER remove the radiator cap until the engine has thoroughly cooled.! The coolant in the radiator is under pressure, and you could get seriously burned if it sprays out at you. Be patient! Let it cool down so much that you can touch the engine without burning your fingers. This will take about 45min. To an hour.
- If the radiator is low on coolant, you can add straight water in this emergency. Check to see when you add the water if it comes out of a hose or the radiator right away. If there is a big leak, call a tow truck. You can’t drive the vehicle without some type of coolant running through the radiator or you will kill your engine.
- If you do add water and this saves the day, you will still need to get your car checked out for leaks and have a proper anti-freeze/water mixture added to the coolant system. You don’t want to have the same problems or worse on the way home.
If the radiator is full of coolant there is not much else you can do, except call a tow truck and have a professional mechanic check it out. There are a number of different reasons a car will overheat. The most common ones are worn out radiator hoses or fan belts breaking. It could also be the radiator, the thermostat, radiator cap, recovery tank, malfunction of the cooling fan or something as simple as a clamp coming loose on one of the hoses. So make it a point to have your cooling system along with all your other critical systems inspected by your mechanic before you begin your trip. See my next blog on what you can check before you take off on your next getaway. Happy travels.