evens waterless coolent?

anyone here use it.. i have me ecotec engine in my alfa romeo, and have been looking into it.....

We tried it in the cars at work. Big, pre-war classics.

Very unimpressed. Thick, runs hot, needs prep fluid on a system that has previously had water in it. Expensive.

We've honestly had far better luck running 100% old fashioned green antifreeze. No more foaming, far less overheating, available anywhere and can be topped off with water if need be.

Yeah, a friend of mine ran it in his turbo Miata.  Seemed like way more effort than it was worth.

What problem are you trying to solve?

Turbo rotary guys love the stuff because it is the only coolant that won't boil near the spark plugs, where the metal temperature can exceed 400F.

If you aren't running an engine that has severe hot spot problems like that, I'd not bother.   An Ecotec is probably just fine with standard coolants.  A Ford Flathead with about 6" of exhaust port running through the block, or a small block Chevy with the siamesed exhaust ports shrouding the center two spark plugs, I'd consider it.

I am planning on running it in both of my RX-7s.  I think it's gone down in price, it is only around $40 a gallon now.  $120 will be enough to do both of them.

BMW e39 v8 guys/gals would run this due to the brittle nature of the stock coolant system plastics because the waterless coolant doesnt develop the pressure of standard water based coolants.

Probably isnt as effective at removing thermal energy but I guess ever product has its place...

Back probably 10 years ago GRM treated Evans like Franks Red Hot and put that E36 M3 in everything.  Always seemed a bit like an answer to a question no one asked.  If it was so good, the OEMs would use it.  

I was thinking of using it in my Prelude when I'm done rebuilding it.  No better time to do it (I think?) than when the whole system is drained and dry.  On the other hand to avoid wasting expensive Evans due to an unforeseen leak, I might want to run cheap antifreeze for awhile to shake down the system.  But that defeats the purpose...

Something I didn't get through my thick skull through two decades of old car projects, until now, is the relationship between coolant boiling and pressure.  Every time I had a car that liked to boil over, I thought it worked like this: overheating leads to boiling leads to pressure escaping.  So I'd upgrade the radiator and fans, but it would always be on the edge of boiling over.  Must be the hot Oklahoma summers.

No.  The real chain of events is:  loss of pressure - lowers the boiling point - which leads to the perception of overheating.

So right there you can see both the appeal of waterless coolant, and the way to not need it.  Since it doesn't need high pressure to avoid boiling, it doesn't put as much stress on old rubber parts, isn't as sensitive to radiator cap operating right, etc.  Or to not need waterless, you can update all the fragile components and pressure test the system.

Getting a radiator pressure test kit off Amazon changed the way I diagnose cars.  Right off the bat I found a crack in the top tank of my 05 Civic that only opens up under pressure.  Normally there would have been so much steam and heat involved that it would be hard to pin down the source when it happened after running.  But being able to see that open up and weep coolant when the engine was cold was definitive proof that pressure, not heat, was involved.

I guess to bring that anecdote around to the original topic, if I had put waterless coolant into the car I probably could have run that radiator with no problems!  Maybe a slow leak. But I'm not crazy; I replaced the radiator.

I use it in track cars where I can't run antifreeze.  Otherwise I use antifreeze.

It has its benefits and drawbacks.  Yes it will run hotter, but it doesn't matter.  Engines don't care what temperature they are.  They care about heat out being more than heat in.  The only reason we call 230 degrees "overheating" is because that's about where traditional coolant boils.  It has nothing to do with the 230 degrees.  It's because once it boils, you're done.  If you raise the boiling point, the engine won't care if it's 200 degrees of 300 degrees.  Iron melts at 2800.  Aluminum alloys typically melt around 1500.  Combustion events can be 2500 degrees.  230 degrees doesn't warp heads.  Boiling and the resulting super-heating of some parts of the metal warps heads.

There are caveats.  You'll have to monitor oil temps since you'll likely be going outside the temperature ranges that the OEM tested for other fluids and materials.  Straight non-aqueous coolant is also less efficient at absorbing and releasing heat.

On the upside, no water means less corrosion, higher boiling point, and no need for a high-pressure cap which can stress gaskets and hoses.

I equate using non-aqueous coolant to riding a roller coaster.  Your brain knows that its perfectly safe and millions of people have been on this coaster and not died, but it doesn't stop your natural programming from the feeling that something terrible is going to happen.  The first time I used it I was towing 10k lbs up a mountain for 150 miles from Phoenix to Flagstaff in 103 degree summer heat.  It was so strange watching the coolant temp gauge nearly peg at 290, but it was also nice not having to stop at those water hoses like so many others were.  No ping, no problems, no nothing.

I do wish I had fully bypassed the trans circuit in the radiator.  I did kinda cook the ATF.

The bottom line is that it has benefits as a coolant.  It is not better at cooling.  It is better at not giving a E36 M3 if it's hot.

Dirt bike guys love the stuff, and I've bought a few bikes that had Evans in it. I tried it, but had a lot of problems with pinging and knocking because the head and cylinder temperatures were getting so much higher. No temperature gauge or thermostat on dirt bikes so I have no idea how hot it was getting, but this was in normal race conditions where straight water or coolant had no problem. I would guess the two bikes I tried it on were just close enough to the edge of heat rejection capability that Evans no longer cut it.

I have still seen guys kill engines with Evans. There are certain kinds of races (hard enduro, extremely muddy hare scrambles where the radiators pack up, etc) where guys love it because they will never boil over, but eventually things get hot enough that, like Curtis said, something else usually gets over its temperature capability and fails. Sometimes it galls the piston, usually the engine starts pinging badly and can burn up the piston, and I've seen a few people kill bottom ends and clutches because they literally smoked the engine oil in a 4 stroke. Not sure how applicable all that is in a car though, since we typically have temperature gauges. On a dirt bike, the coolant overflow usually dumps onto the exhaust header so you know it's starting to overheat and can either back off or stop for a minute to let it cool down before you get a complete boil over.

It is also remarkably inconvenient to not be able to top off with water if you spring a leak somewhere.

I think it has its place, but it seems to me like there is usually some other solution that is a more "complete" fix, i.e. bigger radiator, radiator fan, something of that nature. Evans is just easier to pour in and consider it done.

In reply to gearheadE30 :

It sounds like the reduced heat capacity of the Evans was more of a drawback than the reduced boiling in the cylinder head is a benefit.

The turbo rotary guys note reduced heat-related problems, because the hot spots in the engine actually get cooled by the coolant, instead of the coolant floating on a film of steam and unable to contact the hot metal surfaces.  It runs hotter coolant temperature-wise because it is actually able to remove the heat, in other words.

Our experience was in older, non-pressurised cooling systems and we found that it foamed just as bad as an antifreeze-water mix.