You may have seen in the news that we’re having an unusual cold snap here in the South. Now, when up North I’ve seen ads for “winterizing your car” and just shrugged - I mean, I guess they do something with antifreeze or something? Anyway, I don’t know anybody who does anything like that down here to their cars.
My mother’s having conniptions about my car - I lied and told her I parked in the heated garage last night because I just didn’t want to deal with it and I was too tired to nag my boyfriend into moving his motorcycle and stuff around. Anyway, she’s flipping out because my car is even now sitting in a parking lot, gasp, outdoors, and it’s below freezing and “your engine block is going to crack!”
Now, it’s been cold before, you know? Granted, it isn’t usually in the teens, but it’s been cold, and my engine block certainly hasn’t cracked. Is my car really in any danger, either from sitting in the parking lot in the sun (not likely, IMHO) or me leaving it out of the garage for another cold night? I heard 25 tonight, not nearly as low as last night.
The way cold usually cracks an engine block is by freezing the coolant. The coolant expands and exploits any weakness in the block, causing it to crack. Most people use antifreeze in their cooling systems to prevent this. In the event that someone uses straight water or not enough glycol or it just gets that cold, engines have ‘freeze plugs’. These are plugs in the engine block designed to pop out if the liquid freezes, giving the ice somewhere to go instead of cracking the block.
If you have antifreeze, your coolant will appear ‘neon green’. The ratio I’ve always heard is 50/50 distilled water and antifreeze. (You don’t have to use distilled water, but it’s cheap enough.)
Is that something they do when I have them change the oil at the dealership? (It’s humiliating to have to admit that while I have a theoretical understanding of what goes on under a car’s hood, I give it to the guys in the jumpsuits and when they give it back to me I drive it away. I put the key in, I drive it places, it goes. Every so often I think to check the oil.) How do you even see what color your coolant is anyway?
To look at your coolant, take off the radiator cap. The coolant should be visible. If it isn’t, it’s low.
They don’t change the coolant when you take the car in for an oil change. That’s called a coolant change and costs extra. I think this is different from a ‘cooling system flush’, I stand to be corrected. A change in my mind is simply a drain-and-fill, while a flush gets rid of sludge and other deposits in the system. I’ve heard people say that a ‘flush’ is a waste of money. Drain-and-fill? Seems like a good idea from time to time.
Well actually I have seen the color of antifreeze, just a few times mind you, but I have seen it.
What year is your car?
To the best of my knowledge all modern cars use a mixture of coolant and water in their cooling systems. For simplicity’s sake we will call it antifreeze (even if you live in the desert it is still called antifreeze)
The antifreeze/water mixture does several things. first off it lowers the freezing point of the mixture below 32F, secondly it raises the boiling point above 212F, and lastly, and in some ways most importantly it inhibits corrosion inside the engine.
Almost any % mixture of antifreeze and water will protect down to 25F that is actually not that cold.
Antifreeze can be a number of colors depending on the type of antifreeze and the dye used when it is made. yellow, green, blue, neon green or yellow, red, or orange are all very common colors.
In any event, your car maker probably specifies a change interval for the antifreeze in your car. Assuming the shop you are taking it to is even 1/2 on the ball, they probably have kept up with this service schedule or even exceeded it.
If you are still concerned about your car, tonight just before you go to bed, go out and run your car for say 10-15 minutes and get the engine good and warm. shut it off and go to bed. All that heat generated by running the engine will take some time to dissipate, and you should be good to go. Now if you lived in Cannuckastan, this advice would not apply, but where you live it should be fine.
It’s a 2004 Pontiac Grand Prix. Really what I ought to do is kick my boyfriend’s ass into moving his motorcycle so I can park in MY GARAGE. They say it hit 19 last night in my area (they were forecasting 10) but I think it’s only supposed to do 25 tonight, which my car has seen before.
So if a modern car has a coolant mix already in it, it doesn’t need “winterizing” or whatever?
I don’t do anything special to my car for the winter (other than the usual checking of fluid levels), it’s a 2004 Mazda 3, and it started up fine at -10F yesterday. You should be fine.
Again if you lived in Cannuckistan, winterizing would consist of making sure the antifreeze mixture was concentrated enough for the expected low temps, making sure that there were winter wiper blades on the car, and the windshield washer solvent was of the antifreeze type (yes they make a special low temp windshield fluid for cold places). They would also test the battery to make sure it has enough power to start on a cold winter morning. Plus probably a few more things that I am unaware of, living in sunny Southern California.
Why do you say that?
I would agree that if you have AC it probably has antifreeze in the system, there is nothing that prevents AC from working even if there is pure water in the cooling system.
Nobody sells cars or changes the coolant without putting antifreeze in them. Antifreeze is also for the boiling point and rust inhibitor properties. Unless you have been adding water to the cooling system your fine. Winterizing also includes being sure you have a 5W-30 or 5W-40 oil in the engine before it gets really cold.
Only an ignorant fool, or someone in some particular type of dire emergency, would fill the engine’s cooling system with just water, rather than the standard antifreeze/water mix. Thus it’s pretty safe bet that your coolant is what it ought to be and that it won’t freeze and crack the engine block. Your mother is apparently projecting some stories from ages ago (based on what were poor practices even then) onto modern automotive reality. It’s a virtually certainty that she’s woefully misinformed and just wrong.
“Winterizing” is for the most part an outdated concept - a holdover from the days when cooling systems used just water in the warm months and alcohol in the cold months, requiring twice a year changes to avoid cracked blocks (frozen water) or severe overheating (boiled away alcohol). A winter readiness check (antifreeze mixture right? battery okay? wipers good? heater work?) makes sense, but generally there’s nothing to do to actually “winterize” the car.
IANA mechanic.
