What's in my water?

[kayboykb]

Okay - a little while back I decided to clean up my WC components. I didn't really give them a thorough clean, but I ran super hot water throgh all the tubes and everything. I put in my distilled water (around 90% or so) and 10% of antifreeze.. after a couple of days my water became brown and full of nasty minerals. It was really nasty.. My Mag 3 died too, the part that lies over the O-ring just about exploded.. =/! I think all that gunk backup screwed it up.

So I ordered the mcp655.. and drained my system. I did the hot water thing again, and cleared out my radiator for an hour, the brown stuff just kept coming. Sometimes thick pieces of .. something would come out. Now my tubes are stained brown and I still see minerals in the water after cleaning it (it's still light brown too).. I don't wanna kill my mcp655..

It stained my ceramic sink too! Gaahhhh, what should I use to clean this out? I'm going to buy some new tubes most likely.

[learning curve]

Ummmm for your hot water clean out did you use tap water? Also I would use vinegar to clean it out now.

[5|*42]

Rust? Or something bad. I would've taken everything apart the first time, but do it now anyways and see where the stuff is coming from.

[kayboykb]

Yeah I did use tap water, I think that's a no-no now that I think about it..

And when I took it apart the main bulk of it looked like it had collected in my radiator. That's where the "gunk" part of it was coming from, the rest of it was just thick nasty brown water all throughout the system.

[5|*42]

I would try cleaning it out with with white vinegar. There's a few old threads about cleaing rads that can be found with search ;)

[kayboykb]

;) I was just about to say I saw a thread talking about white vinegar earlier.. I'll give that a try.

[gulp35]

Either an algal bloom or really fast galvinic reactions (due to the increased temp).

Though I had my Mag3 explode in a similar fashion after I left my system running with just Distilled for 2 months and i tried to kill some of it by putting some Pine-Sol in it (by reccomendation from one of these forums)... luckily I have my watercooling in an external box :)... made of MDF :( ... carefully painted and polished MDF :cry: