Should I be concern with air filled upper radiator hose? the one from thermostat to radiator. I am new to diesel engines and got a 2005 Excursion 6.0L diesel with 150k miles. I have driven it for ~1000 miles, degas bottle looked filed to the max mark and coolant in bottle looks clean golden. Is this something normal?

 

Hose should be full of coolant. Was a flush recently performed?

 

That is what I thought. I just got the car so I don't know much about its past history. I was thinking after driving it through multiple heating cycle it would purge the air but did not.

 

1. How do you know air is in the upper hose?
2. Degas bottle level should be at the min mark or slightly lower when hot. You have too much coolant if its at the max mark.

 

Here is an easy way to refill and not have air in the system.
Yes I know he is working on a 6.4. Go to about 4 min in to the video.
Use the spec for the 6.0L


Very nice tool to have.

Sean

 

69cj - By feeling the pipe, on the cold engine, I can tell that upper half is empty. My degas bottle has original sticker on it. Its max marking is below bottle's MIN mark.

Sean - I am thinking of unhooking the main pipe from radiator and just fill the both radiator and pipe from there. I took the air line from radiator to degas bottle and tried to vacuum the air out, while hopping system will refill itself via coolant in degas bottle but that did not seem to work for me.

 

starting to sound like a bad water pump

 

Per4mance - you could be right. I need to read more about effects of bad water pump. I just noticed over weekend that letting car idle for a while, oil temp rises to normal but water temp stay low. Once I drive it for a 5-6 miles, water temp becomes normal and car drives like it should. Once everything warm and I turn off the engine for about 45min when re-started, water temp gets to normal faster than oil temp. BY the way, when water temp is low, it drives like it has no power. That happens all the time no matter what oil temp is.

I also installed coolant filter last weekend, coolant looked clean and new. Tried to pull air out of system as much as I could.

 

Besides the factory temperature gauges do you have any way to monitor engine temps? The factory gauges are nothing but idiot lights with needles and basically only read cold/normal/hot. The engine oil pressure dash gauge will read "normal" with only 7.5 psi of pressure when it's MUCH higher.

 

I just notice that what I thought to be engine oil temp gauge is actually transmission oil temp

I will just go a head and change thermostat (Motorcraft RT1169) and see what happens.

 

Do yourself AND your engine an enormous favor and buy some gauges that monitor the engine vitals in real time......I use ScangaugeII for around $150.00 bucks but the rest of the guys on here can tell you about a few others but what I'm trying to say is get some gauges other than those in the dash cluster, they'll just tell you when you have catastrophic failure.....oh yeah, and did I mention GET GAUGES?

 

Back up a little bit, you have NO scan guage or anything like that? How do you know it has air traped in it ?

 

I had air trapped and could tell when I changed the T-stat last time.
You look into the hose when it off and you can see the marks on the
rubber at the radiator end. Looks like a discolored mark on the inside
of the hose on the upper side.

When I do this next T-stat I will be replacing both the upper and lower hoses.

Sean

 

OK--here's the thing. If you look at where the upper hose and the small hose that go to the degas bottle leave/enter the radiator you can see that a very SMALL amount of air can get trapped in the hose. So what? Even if you put a vacuum on the system it will probably reappear at some point. There is a constant stream of bubbles being created from cylinder wall vibration that go from the small intake hose to the degas bottle. Isn't that what the degas bottle is for, after all?

 

In my case it was not a small mark.
Also the hoses look old and it is time.

Sean