At the end of this week and all through next week, I will be taking my family to the “most magical place on earth!”  Keep in mind, I have three daughters at the ages of 5 (almost 6 if you ask her), 3, and 1. (Not to mention my wife who has spent endless hours researching and scheduling our events for the week.) It’s not just my household that is going on this trip though, it is my entire family, parents, siblings, teenage nieces, and one nephew.   I honestly don’t remember the last family vacation we went on with all of us there so it is going to be an amazing experience no matter what.

The trip from Cincinnati, OH to Orlando, FL is approximately 13 hours, factor in the children and parents ages and I am going to go ahead and say we are looking at 24 hours of travel, at least.   Now I am being smart, we are breaking this trip up into two days. I envision something that will look like a military convoy going down I-75 when the 3 vehicles all get going, the painful truth is it will look more like the Clampets move to Hollywood.

In preparation for the trip I have been doing some routine maintenance on our family van and discovered what I believed to be a rather bad coolant leak.  Now, I didn’t see the leak but I noticed the lack of coolant in the system.   So I started to conduct a few tests and oddly enough, they involved compressed air.   First I filled the system and pulled a vacuum on the entire cooling system to draw out any air.   Once I pulled around 11″ of mercury, I went ahead and turned off my compressed air vacuum generator and tried to see if it would lose vacuum.  It didn’t, so I then hooked a hose to a container of coolant and slowly released the vacuum sucking the coolant down into the system and eliminating the risk of air bubbles.

Since I couldn’t see a loss in vacuum I decided I would test the system under pressure.  To do this I simply removed the radiator cap and attached a special tool which would pump air down into the radiator and put the entire system under pressure, much like it would be during normal operation.  Once I built the pressure up to 15 psig, the factory cap was rated for 16 psig,  I let it sit.  I scoured every single coolant line I could find and came up dry.  Couldn’t find a single drop of coolant escaping the system at all and it even held pressure for a solid hour. Coming up with no leak I decided to give it a test drive and low and behold, I have yet to find a leak.  My only theory at this point is during some warranty work a dealership must have disconnected a hose and forgot to fill it back up, or it is normal evaporation seeing as how I don’t remember the last time I topped off the coolant.

The entire time I was troubleshooting this system I found it interesting I was still using compressed air in some form, even on a liquid cooling system.  I then started to wonder if I am going to be able to see any EXAIR products while at that magical park in Orlando, hopefully something like the Roaring Banana Breath that is featured in our Super Air Amplifiers section of the catalog. Our amplifiers also get used to puff air at folks during other “4D” experiences throughout the world.

Nonetheless, compressed air helped me determine that my family’s vehicle is not going to be spraying coolant on the roadway during this trip and I am glad for it.

Brian Farno
Application Engineer Manager
BrianFarno@EXAIR.com
@EXAIR_BF