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Well did coolant flush today and on first drop coolant looked rusty so continued to flush. After a few its starts to clear up so decide to pull coolant filter to change it ,because going to use ELC coolant and didn't want ti mixing with the ford gold . When i get filter off i notice it all rusty in the top of it , i mean bad rust its only been on there for about 2 months. I have had a leaking degas bottle for few months and have just been adding tap water could this have done the rust.
I did a coolant flush a couple weeks ago and I started by draining the system and dumping out the coolant filter (which still looked perfect), then I reinstalled it and flushed with tap water for several hours (I was preping to change the oil cooler) then took it off before I started the distilled water flush and it was already rusty on the top.
I used tap water too all flushes everything but it does go thru my water softner system the water feels SLICK after its gone thru the water softner
even if I didnt have the water softner I would just use tap water
to much straight water will cause rust and cavitation need that 50/50 mix
I also think it kinda depends where you live on water quality where I live its great Iv had it tested I have a big 50gal fish aquarium so Im really picky about it
did you run some VC-9 thru it that stuff works great to get rid of rust
when I first started flushing a year ago I couldnt get the water clean I ran vc-9 but had the thermistate in and must of flushed 15 times and was still coming out dirty
finally I pulled the thermistate out dumped in 2 bottles VC-9 set it to high idel for an hour and low and behold after the 4th flush it was as clean going in as it was coming out and I mean crystal clean
that VC-9 works great on rust but you need the thermistate out so it moves large volumes of water/cleaner
I'm not sure how a water softener works but it must remove salts and metals and maybe even deionize water. If you use tap with all that stuff in it you would likely notice more corrosion than you see with the soft water.
Being in the water treatment area I can tell you that using raw tap water from a public supply is a bad idea in a cooling system. The chlorine or Chloramine are very strong oxidizers and will cause serious rust issues and react with the OAT and HOAT coolants pretty bad. The cooling system will start to rust if the mix is not 50/50 so if you let it get really far out of whack because the degas bottle was leaking then you should consider a rust remover. The entire inside of the engine will look like the coolant filter you removed.
This may be a stupid question, but if you use the cleaning solution and it loosens all the corrosion so you can get it out, won't you be taking a chance on getting some of that crap stuck in the oil cooler?