Lately, past week, I’ve noticed that after driving for like 30 mins after warmup coolant is evaporating and escaping from under the hood. I notice an antifreeze smell and notice coolant “steam” coming from the right front corner of the hood. When I open the hood I can’t see where it’s coming from, its escaping that slowly. Eventually enough escapes that the level gets low enough to begin overheating. I have noticed that the lower radiator hose is barely warm, as if warmed by the engine heat and not the coolant inside it. The upper hose is quite warm, you can only touch it for a few seconds. The engine temp is right on and does not increase until the level decreases enough to empty the resivoir. This is after like three days.
I flushed the radiator at the end of summer like four months ago. The thermo, pump and radiator are all one and a half years old. Also I am not noticing any liquid leaking just the steam.
Any ideas on what to check?
It might be a slow leak, so you can always try some radiator leak-
sealer (like Prestone) in your cooling system. If THAT doesn’t work, then you can worry about checking every hose, connection, and the radiator…
I am guessing it is one of two things.
The first one is that you have a leak from one of your radiator hoses. Just a little needle sized hole could cause that. If the hoses look old and abused just change them to be on the safe side.
The other thing would be a leak in the radiator tank. The stock radiator is made of metal, but the tanks are made of plastic. There is a gasket where the tank meets the metal and the tank is only held on there by little bent pieces of metal. Once the tank or gasket goes you get a greenish slimelike substance where the coolant is oozing from. Check both tanks for that slimey substance because that is probably your problem if its not the hoses.
I have had both problems before too.
Worse case scenerio is that you have a blown head gasket, but lets not think about that…
Later,
BR