Major Coolant Leak

[dcracer572]

Hi, so driving home from work tonight the coolant bleeder valve (little plastic tee that connects two hoses near the intake manifold) cracked in half separating the two hoses and leaking coolant all over my engine bay. It seems to be a fairly common, simple, and inexpensive fix. However here are the issues.

1) I must have driven the car around 35-40 minutes with it leaking a significant amount of coolant. I know this because at the beginning of my drive I thought I saw smoke in my driver side mirror from the back of my car, it was dark out and snow was still blowing off my car so I thought it might have just been that and kept going.

2) Despite driving for this extended period of time I had no warning. Engine temp gauge showed normal, no engine or warning lights, had the heat on and vents were still blowing warm air. There were no signs of overheating or it loosing coolant until I pulled into my driveway and smoke came from the hood.

So really my question is first, why were there absolutely no warning signs? Is that section of the system (part # LR006158) maybe not crucial to the overhaul cooling of the engine? Or did all the sensors and gauges just happen to be faulty?

Second question is what kind of other damage this might have done. The car was driving fine, normal acceleration, shifting was normal. But 40 minutes of driving with a major coolant leak has me worried other parts may have been compromised.

Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks

Edit: It looks like this piece is part of the by-pass system. Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe the purpose is for coolant to by-pass the radiator (stays warm) and heat a colder engine. If that's the case it would perhaps explain why the engine didn't overheat so quickly as it was still getting coolant from the radiator?

 

[Houm_WA]

Did you check the coolant level once you were home?

I would replace that valve with a brass one and refill with coolant. Maybe you got lucky!

 

[dcracer572]

Yup that's the plan.

Coolant level maybe lost a few cups at most. Not good but not as bad as it seemed last night.

 

[Houm_WA]

You can prolly troubleshoot the coolant sensor by unplugging it to see if you get an alert.

 

[maxx4wd]

By the sounds of it you probably got lucky. Stock coolant sensors and the dash violent temp indicators usually notify you after there is a problem and aren’t really that helpful. But since they never went on and you only lost a few cups (assuming you still had some fluid in your reservoir tank then you’re probably still fine. The stock plastic bleed valve is a common failure point and really should be tossed in the trash it’s pretty much useless. If I were you just replacenit with a brass coupler and some small hose clamps and call it a day. I’ve been running mine like that for the last 5 years and it’s never given me a problem since. British Atlantic has a nice coolant bleed instructional video that really helps get all the air out. I’d follow that. It takes forever but sees to work nicely.

 

[anglotron]

Mine decided to break at the pile of rocks on the Mojave Road so you're lucky yours failed at home! I lost a lot of coolant and the engine went into some kind of limp-home mode with reduced power. I trail fixed it with a pen body, added more coolant and fortunately no damage was done.

If you haven't already it's worth replacing all of the plastic thermostat assembly as preventative maintenance. Whilst you're doing that there's also a coolant hose right under the inlet manifold at the front that can leak and it's a real pain to get to.