4tika4

I dont know whats going on with my car. I have some brown residue that comes out of my exhaust. There is water in my muffler. like a puddle. I drilled a hole in the piping today and it dripped out and its gone. there is no visible smoke when its normal warm weather.

ef_b18a1

if your burning anti freeze, you can actually taste it from your exhaust, has a sweet taste to it... i would know, i had a warped head on my b18, and found that out after pulling the head 4 different times... you would be blowing white smoke... but your case im not sure, from what i think, i dont think it is... and from what i just said those are the cases you have with burning antifreeze..

4tika4

Do you think its possible that water couldnt escape my muffler/exhaust? Its angled upward a little. Could it just be surface rust? But the residue gets all over my rear bumper and stuff. I have pictures, but when i tried to upload them it said it failed. Let me try again

4tika4

sanimalp

Did you know that most exothermic hydrocarbon combustion reactions produce water as one of the products of the reaction? an example is propane, a hydrocarbon in the same sense gasoline is:



you are seeing the normal product of a hydrocarbon combustion reaction.

if your car is smoking white all the time, not just when it is cold out, then you may have cause for alarm. you would probably also notice it running shitty and you would be using a large amount of coolant in a short time span. if both of those are not the case, then you don't really need to worry.

4tika4

well you can hear it gargle, and the water doesnt just drip out, it spits it out. So i dont know. Do you know what could be up with this brown residue?

sanimalp

your angled up exhaust tip needs a bleed hole at its lowest point, but it sounds like you already made one, which is going to fix the problem. most aftermarket exhausts have them already, but if your system is custom, it probably wasn't accounted for. the water will just pool in the lowest spot and create a restriction unless a hole is made.

the water is brown because it contains soot from the partial burn of the hydrocarbon that is all over in the exhaust, mainly because the burn equation above is in ideal stoich. conditions, which is rarely ever the case in real world application.

4tika4

ya. After i drove it around with the new hole, it seemed pretty dry. Cool, well thats a relief. Im going to ditch this muffler pretty soon anyways. Thanks for your help.