Testing coolant with a multimeter

There’s one way to find out.

Some questions:

• How long has your coolant been in service?
• When was your water pump last changed out?
• Any signs of seepage around the seal of the water pump?
• Belt is in good shape?

Good luck and keep us posted .

 

You can give it a shot and see what you get.

If you don’t know the history of the car, you could always start now and then know where you stand.

Fluid changes are the good to do early in your ownership, but collect a data point never hurts.

Good luck and keep us posted .

 

Ridiculous.

You don't test "conductivity" by measuring voltage.

There might be a valid principle here......but the "test" described certainly has nothing to do with it.

 

There's something sort of interesting and intriguing about the idea of measuring the voltage from my radiator neck to my battery negative post, and there's enough potentially true about electrolysis and the galvanic series to potentially make such a test potentially plausible, but one thing I see absolutely none of in that article is research, or even links to research, establishing what normal values and ranges would be, what other known ways of testing coolant condition it was compared to, and what was the strength of the correlation, and what were the grounds for recommending 0.4 V as a threshold? You know, just all the stuff that matters to validating a test method, and there's just plain none of it in the article, which also doesn't mention any sources.

There's a "content submission" link at the bottom of their page. I haven't read what their rules are for submissions, but there are a lot of that kind of site that will pretty much pay you something to write anything that seems related to their topic and gets them clicks. Beyond that, their standards for asking how you think you know what you're claiming might not be, ehrm, much of a burden.

This comes up at a good time, because I just discovered yesterday that Phoenix Systems, who make test strips for coolant (and also for brake fluid) has come up with a nifty combo package of their tests:



I don't work for them, but I think I'll probably buy that kit. The last time I checked their site (however long ago that was), I think they only sold packs of 100 (too much money, I'd never use 'em all), or, like, onesy-twosies (mail order something every time I feel like testing something? not happening). A pack of 15 seems to pass the Goldilocks test for my purposes.

-Chap

Edit:

Well, there are two senses in which you kind of do. First, any time you set a multimeter for ohms, what it does under the hood is apply enough voltage to flow a certain current, then it just does the scaling for you to report the result in ohms.

More directly, in a case where you're interested in the galvanic effect between dissimilar metals in an electrolyte (which is really what the article is about), you can indeed straight-up put your probes in and measure voltage. In that case, the writer may have been sloppy with the language ("conductivity") but the principle was not crazy. My real objection to the article was, even if an idea is "not crazy", you will still need to do some science to figure out what the normal values should be and how good a test it makes, and none of that is there. Without that, it can have "truthiness" but nothing more.

 

I prefer to just replace, per the maintenance schedule, months or miles, whichever comes first.

 

Have you tried entering the VIN at http://www.toyota.com/owners ?

Pretty sure there will be some recorded maintenance, most likely not what you were looking for.

 

Thing that bugs me about that site is, it has a whole form where I can enter maintenance I do myself, but it's only visible to me, not to anybody else. I can kind of see why, in case an unscrupulous owner fakes a bunch of maintenance records for you to see. But their "solution" turns the problem of judging the last owner's credibility (which you might be able to do, if, say, it was someone you knew), into just making the info completely unavailable. You'd be better off just writing your maintenance records on a sheet of paper and handing it to a buyer.

There are probably even data linkups they could easily do ... every time I claim to have changed my oil, my local dealer has a record of selling me several bottles of 0W-20 and a filter ... hmm, what could it mean?

-Chap

 

How much does mileage have to do with coolant? I have several cars that only get 60 miles a year if they are lucky.

I really need a lifetime coolant.

 

That's interesting test.
I had tried similar test for different reason - I was curious if the red fluid leakage could conduct electricity possibly accounting for some the rare headlight wiring failures (fires) we had in Gen3. I put some of the red fluid in a bowl and tried to test resistance as it exposed to air over several months. I was also trying to see if I could make a red clump of dried salts like we had all the pink stalactites on Gen2's under the water pump. But it took a year or so for the darn stuff to evaporate and it just made a thin film of red salts. I did not conclude anything.

Many Gen2's had their engine water pumps replaced as almost all leaked by 80000 miles, and many were covered under the extended warranty for those who had bought it (at the time on Prius Chat you could purchase extened warranty for reasonable cost). But being a cheap skate, I did not purchase the extended warranty, and therefore I procrastinated replacing the pump, adding more red fluid to fill up. Guess what- the leak stopped and I must be the only one with a 12 yr old. orig water pump.

 

Best way to test it is to replace it.

When I buy a used car I replace all the fluids. In doing so you become very familiar with the mechanics of the car and may discover very early on other issues.

Specifically for a Prius g2=

Engine coolant
Inverter coolant
TRans fluid
Engine oil
Water pump belt

And if your really smart a new inverter coolant pump.

Diy cost of all the fluids and belt is $150. If you can’t afford that you are in trouble.

 

Some of us don't consider replacing stuff that is perfectly good to be "smart".

 

Though not smart, I proactively replaced the inverter pump (which had 100k on it) before driving out to Texas in the summer.

And still do it when I change the perfectly good synthetic oil every 5k miles

 

I have been in both camps, time changes are common on aircraft critical parts.
Cars always seem to break down at the wrong place and the wrong time and can leave you in an unsafe place to pull over.
I have changed things just because of mileage and peace of mind.
I have had a few of the parts I changed fail within 30 days too so you decide what is right for you.

 

You need to weigh the factors: would a breakdown be disastrous or not, is the part cheap/easy to replace or not, does that part have a history of failure, at what miles typically?

 

Timing belts also come to mind for a time change and there is a recommended mileage in the maintenance manual to do it.
Should I change my timing belt on a car that has low mileage and 14 years old because after all it is a belt?

 

Prius has a timing chain ... though I understand your point may have been more general.

The factors that influence failure risk all weigh in differently for different bits of the car; miles more than time for some, time more than miles for others, sun or humidity or temperature swings or rough roads more for some.

As Mendel says:

The other side of the account ledger needs to be considered too: not just the price of a proactive operation, but the risk of an unintended consequence. No matter how good at this stuff you may be, it is overconfidence to assign an actual "zero" to the likelihood that something in the car that was not a problem before you started the work may become a problem by the time you're done.

Iatrogenesis is always a factor to weigh in. I am pretty confident in my workmanship, but I still never forget to give some attention to that part of the overall risk picture before deciding to tear into something.

-Chap

 

Yeah any surgery is risky.

^ Learned a new word. Not sure how long it'll stick.

Iatrogenesis - Wikipedia