Hey guys, i have a pretty simple question about coolant that i've tried searching about, but it's pretty "hit and miss" due to all the different colors/brands and such.

So a little bit earlier i was installing my injen SRI into my '08 fg2, and i got to the part where you disconnect the upper coolant out line, which also leads to the throttle body coolant in.

Injen's instructions failed to tell me that my coolant would instantly come pouring out (maybe i should have expected this, but i'm no mechanic..) and most of it got all over my garage floor.

Up to that point, i was just learning as i went along, so when my coolant went everywhere i got pretty frustrated/pissed and just put everything back on the way it was (probably would have been easier to just proceed with putting the sri on lol.)

Anyways, blue coolant came out and i put some 50/50 green stuff in that said i could combine it with "ANY" color coolant. Is it still a safe thing to do? I'm assuming they'd only put that on there if they knew DAMN well that it was compatible with all the other brands..

I just don't want my motor to overheat! Any advice would be greatly appreciated..

 

bypassing the coolant isnt a necessary step to installing the sri, i skipped that step.
especially if it gets really cold in your area you dont want your throttle body to freeze over cuz then you're either screwed or your sitting there with a heat gun blasting the throttle body. i always put the genuine honda coolant in my car cuz thats what it came with. i dont like mixing different products together. if it says its safe, then i guess its safe. if i were you, i would just use it temporarily then find time to go over to honda and get the genuine coolant, or go buy coolant from somewhere and do a coolant flush.

 

thanks for the reply!

I'm not sure what you'd call that group of hoses that are attached together, but there IS a way to not touch the coolant lines? i didn't think of that, and didn't investigate that route.

I'm just a noob that was following the instructions to a T

 

well theres that metal s bend line that has 2 lines running next to each other, the one on the left is just an air breather, and the right one is coolant if im correct. i just took the lines off the breather, and put them on the intake. the bottom hose that comes off the t-joint is gonna have to run an s shape. the reason i didnt bypass my coolant when i installed the intake was because it was winter and it was real cold out and didnt want to utilize the heat gun lol but now my coolant is bypassed for the summer season.

 

so did you eventually switch it out so it looked better? or for some kind of reliability reason?

i'm not the type to show off my car so i could just say F it and do it the ugly way

edit: will you switch it back to the other way for this coming winter?

 

Hey just curious but even if you don't do the coolant bypass and leave it be, what do you do when your engine is cold? Wouldn't your throttle body still freeze?

You say that it will freeze if you do the coolant bypass. I thought keeping it just made it idle better during warm up?

 

yea the local shop did my coolant bypass along with the installation of my RRC manifold. i plan on it. mine froze last winter when it snowed and it sucked. my motor ended up flooding itself because air wasnt getting through the tb because it was frozen shut. i learned my lesson last winter. because it never froze when my tb coolant wasnt bypassed.

 

there must be something in the coolant or something that doesnt let it freeze.
because i used to park my car outside and when my tb wasnt bypassed, it never froze over, but after it was bypassed, it was frozen over on a daily basis.

 

hmm i may be misunderstanding you



so instead of putting the 12 inch hose like that, you just kept the original hosing? or did you stop it from going to the throttle body altogether?

 

I think he meant he did not hook it up the tb at all. dididoitright?

 

the entire point of running coolant through the throttle body is so that it doesn't freeze during cold weather; the coolant isn't there to cool down the throttle body or anything.

 

Ok but when you start your car in the morning the coolant hasn't warmed up yet. So the coolant won't be warm enough to melt any ice.

I'm guessing that condensation gets on the throttle plate then freezes based on what you are saying? So you are saying the warm coolant will melt the frozen condensation...I guess I don't understand how cold coolant upon start up keeps anything from freezing.

 

This isn't the only reason. Running coolant through the throttle body also helps the car warm up quicker.

The coolant keeps things from freezing while the engine is running. See below for an explanation that I found:

"Anyone who lives where it gets cold in the winter has heard of "wind chill". It'll be 30° with a wind chill of 10°. As the air moves through the throttle body, the same wind chill affects the inside if the throttle body. Under certain conditions, such as high humidity, condensation will form inside the throttle body and the moving air will freeze it. This ice will keep building up until it chokes off the air supply and the engine dies."

When you are cold starting a fuel injected engine, the engine management system will dump extra fuel into the throttle body acting like a choke to help get the engine warmed up. Once the engine is up to temperature, the fuel input is cut back to normal. As I mentioned above, running the coolant through the throttle body helps speed this up so that you aren't in the 'choke' stage as long.

 

fyi: i finally had time to put the intake on, and i'm lovin' it

now to get up enough ***** to install my dc race header and throttle body spacer

 

thats where the heat gun comes into play!

 

lol i get your point. lol.