Is it safe to use car/motorcycle coolant ?

[David-Duc]

-Does anybody know ? Yamaha's comes in red, Honda's in green and they're cheap, much cheaper than Feser's one. Their color looks also good :up:

/The ingredients which were written on the bottle: Ethylene Glycol, anti-freezes and other additive ??? :confused:

[Nickel020]

In Germany many people use BASF G48 & G30 coolant as an anti corrosive and to get colored water. Both are Glycol based.

Whether the Yamaha/ Honda stuff doesn't include another ingredient that might damage acrylic or acetal is something I don't know. The blue/red BASF doesn't for sure though.

Another cooland that people used some time ago but that turned out to be bad is Watter Wetter. So not all stuff is good by default.

[iHannes]

A maximum of 15% i would say. It's mainly used to kill whatever is in your water to keep it fresh.

[Church]

I am shure that car coolant is less capable then distilled water as _coolant_. And do you really need unfreezable property? I don't know about it's relative chemical agressiveness too :/

[David-Duc]

@iHannes: Are you saying that car coolant is more concentrated than pc coolant ?
@churchy: The anti-freezes is listed on the ingredients, it's unnecessary but they mixed the coolant with it :(.
-I don't think coolant can harm any part of the WC because some motorcycles and cars also use plastic reservoir with rubber tubes too.

[Nickel020]

Well you need to use it in a higher concentration in cars for the antifreeze effect. The concentration in PC systems doesn't need to be that high, it kills of algae at a very low concentration and the BASF stuff works well as a corrosion inhibitior at a lower concentration as well.

What churchy is talking about is that glycol is worse at transferring heat than water. A loop filled with glycol will cool worse than a loop full of water, so a mix will be worse as well. If you can live with 1-2C worse at the maximum then that's not a problem. I've yet to see a good test about this, so the 1-2C is an (educated) guess.

[Vinas]

Don't go coolant route unless you're needing sub freezing. Other than that just run distilled as it gives the best performance. Also, antifreeze will not hurt your loop. I've ran my chiller for over a year and broke it down, besides a little color on the tubes (nothing like the dyes mind you, just a slight hint of color whereas the dyes leave caked on gunk), everything was in top order. I believe the lubricants in the antifreeze actually preserve your component life when mixed properly. My chiller uses 50/50 antifreeze, water.