Dealer used green coolant
 

The waterpump on my '86 300E started leaking badly this week. Had to happen sometime. Anyway, took it in to local Dealer to have it replaced.

Got it home, opened the hood and was floored to see the "green" stuff in the overflow tank. I have always used the MB orange stuff and assumed they would refill with the correct fluid. Is it a common occurance for a dealer to use the green stuff? Not a huge deal, but now I have to drain it and refill.


Blake
'86 300E
256K

I can only vouch for the dealership I work at, MB coolant only!
Gilly

hi!

i had to change RAD on my w126 with OM.603.912 engine (6cyl diesel), with aluminium RAD, the old one had corrosion all inside, can i use "orange" coolant? like newer cars today? whats the difference?



PLEASE bagging 4 help!:confused:

yel_low by all means use the MB (orange) coolant. Also purchase yourself one of those coolant concentration testers. It is way easy to have too much coolant.

are you sure it's green? the newer stock of MB anti-freeze is a straw yellow color and in an older yellowed overflow tank looks somewhat green. i found this out when my mechanic insisted that he used MB coolant and i kept thinking that he didn't. when i sucked out the coolant it was yellow. this is more pronounced specially if the coolant concentration is high. mine was at around 70% and i diluted with water which also turned it a lot paler...

First, M-B coolant has about the lowest PH factor of any coolant. Don't use anything else (except maybe BMW).

Second, never use more than 50% coolant. Too much anti-freeze will increase the temperature of the coolant. Water cools better than anti-freeze.

Third, never allow tap water in your cooling system. If you don't put crap in, you don't have to flush it out.

Finally, use one ounce of Redline Water Wetter for each quart of coolant. This will reduce hot spots in an operating engine even if the coolant temperature doesn't appear to be any lower than without it.

I recently sold a 190D that was going on 18 years old. The cooling system worked as well as when it was new and it had never been flushed. I just refreshed the coolant annually at a cost of about 10 bucks.

I would buy into everything said except Redline Waterwetter ... other than decreasing the ratio of coolant to water (increasing proportion of water), which increases the cooling ability since water is better than coolant at this part of the equation.

Would still like to see some independent tests ... a lot of folks have said its use lowered their operating temp ... sure, cause there is more water in the mix ... something independent would be really great.

Water Wetter enhances the coupling of heat in the engine to the coolant. This is like eliminating the bubbles in the bottom of a pan of water you are trying to boil. Once the air bubbles are eliminated, the water will boil because the heat from the pan is coupled to the water.

Water Wetter doesn't *add* any water to the mix, it's there to aid in the transfer of heat to the coolant so it can be carried away to the radiator.

I don't know if I've ever seen any reduction in coolant temps by using Water Wetter but it appears to control the temps. My 300E seldom exceeds 100C even with stop and go driving in Phoenix in the summer. This is a brutal test of a cooling system.

Using 15W-50 Mobil 1 probably helps as well.

bud.........
 

you mentioned that you 'refreshed' your coolant every year.how did you go about this?

orange coolant
 

I changed the water pump in my 1989 260e this past year and used the green coolant initially. After approx 6 weeks I changed over to the MB coolant which was orange in color. I did this after reading some posts on this forum and at the advice of a local MB dealer tech. I've always used distilled water with the coolant. My question is that is the MB coolant the sam as the newer coolant called Dexcool (which is orange) that is used in the newer GM cars? I have been told that in older cars which have used the old green stuff should not use the mewer Dexcool type coolant because it can actually create sludge in the system. I'm told that they operate in different ways. Anybody got the low down on this?

Tom:
My wife and I went through the "Dexcool" problems with her 96 Blazer, I guess it was a fairly common prob with mid-90's S10 Blazers, I've heard a few explainations. I think your web browser should come up with more technical reasons behind it. One explaination I recently heard is that actually it was a radiator problem, materials-related, not the coolant. I also heard that the Dexcool product is affected somehow by air in the system, perhaps even cavitation by the waterpump.
But yeah, her system was just really jammed up with rusty cruddy looking gunk, looked like the truck was run for years with only water in the system, and of course I take good care of our vehicles, so that wasn't the case. It was the original fill of coolant.

No, the MB coolant isn't at all like Dexcool, it's supposed to be replaced at 3 year intervals. The product that MB has been selling for years is more of a yellow color to me too, maybe a slight orange tint before mixing with water. About the same color as clean brake fluid. Dexcool is advertised as an extended service life coolant, 100,000 miles I believe.

As a couple side notes, for the past 2 or 3 years MB has been using a dark blue coolant, at least in the German built vehicles, ML class I believe is still the yellow coolant. No word from MB on if they will eventually use the blue coolant as a replacement in the field or not. I have not seen a change in the replacement interval on the new cars with blue coolant, so I can only assume the blue coolant is not extended service life.


Gilly

I believe the coolant sold by MBUSA in the US is sourced in the US to MBUSA specs. It's possible that cars coming out of Germany have a different coolant than those made in Alabama.

I've heard that problems with M103 head gaskets are due to failure to properly maintain the coolant in these engines. My theory is that tap water might be the primary cause of this problem.

I don't think tap water, per se, can be faulted for head gasket failures, unless failure is due to corrosion effects. Tap water has the same cooling properties as distilled water. Distilled water is favored over tap water because the calcium content in tap water is a mild poison to the cooling system.

I know I am beating this Water Wetter thing a bit, but it drives me nuts to hear products so thoroughly touted without some form of verifiable data that proves the claims.

My comment on water re WW was my understanding that WW requires per its instructions for use a ratio of 30% coolant to 70% water with WW added ... if this is correct, then the water component increase would seem to increase the cooling capacity in and of itself ...

i've used WW twice - the second time because i lost my coolant due to a headgasket change. i'm convinced now that it doesn't really do anything for my car...