- Joined
- Feb 24, 2008
- Location
- California
I found this while searching arround about galvanic corrosion,
a neat idea to blast out any sludge or corrosion you may incounted inside your radiator on the cheap!
Water pistol time
Want to know how I cleaned the radiator? Sure you do.
Radiator
I couldn't look inside the radiator to see if it was as goopy as the water block. With much wider pipes and larger corners, it shouldn't have been, but I couldn't tell. From the outside, it looked as it did when new, except for a healthy fuzz of dust on the grille section.
I was still going to give it a darn good cleaning, though. With small input and output pipes, it'd be a pain to hook it up to a tap and give it a thorough blasting; the pump I was using, even running from more than 12 volts (which is not good for it) didn't have anything like enough power to shove significantly heavier than water crud around all of the corners and out.
So here's how to flush out a somewhat clogged radiator on the cheap, without using amazingly toxic solvents or pumping soapy water through it for days on end.
1) Make sure the radiator tubing's full of water.
2) Point the radiator's pipes at something you don't mind getting all wet. Since the Senfu radiator pipes are copper, it's easy to bend the smaller-diameter header pipes up a bit, for ease of access. And longer range.
3) Jam a butane (lighter gas) can with an appropriate nozzle on it onto one radiator connector. Push down.
4) Observe 20 foot jet of water created when butane flashes to vapour and pushes all of the water out of the radiator very quickly indeed.
Butane's not very good for you, but if you do this in a decently ventilated area without any ignition sources nearby, there's no cause for alarm. And lighter gas is cheap. The ejected water carried plenty of precipitate with it; a few repeats of the flushing procedure probably got the radiator tolerably clean.
You could also do this with an air compressor, of course, but most people don't have one.
http://www.dansdata.com/burning.htm
a neat idea to blast out any sludge or corrosion you may incounted inside your radiator on the cheap!
Water pistol time
Want to know how I cleaned the radiator? Sure you do.
Radiator
I couldn't look inside the radiator to see if it was as goopy as the water block. With much wider pipes and larger corners, it shouldn't have been, but I couldn't tell. From the outside, it looked as it did when new, except for a healthy fuzz of dust on the grille section.
I was still going to give it a darn good cleaning, though. With small input and output pipes, it'd be a pain to hook it up to a tap and give it a thorough blasting; the pump I was using, even running from more than 12 volts (which is not good for it) didn't have anything like enough power to shove significantly heavier than water crud around all of the corners and out.
So here's how to flush out a somewhat clogged radiator on the cheap, without using amazingly toxic solvents or pumping soapy water through it for days on end.
1) Make sure the radiator tubing's full of water.
2) Point the radiator's pipes at something you don't mind getting all wet. Since the Senfu radiator pipes are copper, it's easy to bend the smaller-diameter header pipes up a bit, for ease of access. And longer range.
3) Jam a butane (lighter gas) can with an appropriate nozzle on it onto one radiator connector. Push down.
4) Observe 20 foot jet of water created when butane flashes to vapour and pushes all of the water out of the radiator very quickly indeed.
Butane's not very good for you, but if you do this in a decently ventilated area without any ignition sources nearby, there's no cause for alarm. And lighter gas is cheap. The ejected water carried plenty of precipitate with it; a few repeats of the flushing procedure probably got the radiator tolerably clean.
You could also do this with an air compressor, of course, but most people don't have one.
http://www.dansdata.com/burning.htm