Car's been using alot of water. (long)

cliffnotes: Car's using alot of water and pining at low rpm's. No leaks have been found and car still has good power overall.


So what might I be dealing with here? It seems as though I'm adding water once a month (or more). I havn't noticed any leaks but it has to be going somewhere. Also, it looks as though I'm not getting much use out of my resevoir. I can't remember which brand I used, but I still have orangish coolant in my resevoir that I put in a long time ago. I checked my oil as recently as last month and saw no signs of antifreeze or water. Last oil change was a couple months ago and it looked fine (aside from being "dirty") then too. The car is still running strong and only runs warmer when I get low on water. Otherwise it maintains good temperature (well below dead center on the factory guage), heater's working fine as well.

One other thing. Lately when driving at slow speeds my car will ping unless I go down a gear. This was never an issue up until a few months ago. However, the car doesn't detonate at all in any other situation. Even when I'm going all out.

This is a high mileage, daily driver/racer with just under 300k on the odometer. The engine was overhauled (rings, bearings,etc) when the heads and cam went in but I've gone some 130k since then. Again, the car stronger now than it's ever been but I'm worried that it's going to die on me soon. Not quite ready (financially) to be buying a new block right now unless I find a lower-mileage donor 5.0 motor.

Thanks, I checked/felt the heatercore for moisture a few weeks ago and didn't notice anything. I had the heatercore replaced in the summer of 2002. It was done at a local garage near my house (didn't want to tackle it myself) so I'm not 100% sure about the quality of the heatercore. I'll give it a closer look today.

PRO50SC said:

If you don't have any coolant visible outside the engine , there's only one other place for it to go. Out the tail pipe. Are you seeing any white smoke out the exhaust. It would be most likely to happen when the engine is cold. You may have a bad head gasket or cracked head. You can have this checked at your local shop. I have a chemical that picks up hydrocarbons in your anti freeze. Call around and see if anyone local has this capability to perform this test for you. It's pretty simple and shouldn't be to expensive. Our shop charges 1/2 hour labor. They will probobly want to pressure test the system as well.

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This defiantely sounds like a possibility but I need to know if our idea of "smoke" are the same. In the morning on cold start up there's a very noticeble (but not thick) mist that quickly fades and doesn't linger like smoke. I blew a head gasket last summer and had to have the heads resurfaced. I pretty much scratched the headgasket off the list of suspects when my oil turned up clean. Thanks, guess I'll have to take it in and keep my fingers crossed.

^^^