How Do I Stop Overheating?

This time of year, it’s important to think about how to keep things cool. Checking things like your home air conditioning system and making sure you’ve got a pass to the local pool can be part of keeping your family cool, but what about keeping your car cool? Overheating is one of the biggest causes of engine damage in cars today and the truth is, it’s an easily preventable problem. Your vehicle is designed to keep itself cool and in many new cars, there are alerts and alarms to let you know there is a problem if your cooling system. If your car already has trouble keeping cool, there are some tricks to stopping overheating even in the summer months.

If your car is overheating, obviously it’s important to check the cooling system, but there are some other instances that will cause your engine to run hotter than normal. Unless you’re driving a classic, your vehicle uses a computer to decide how much fuel to add to each cylinder and when to fire the spark plug to get maximum power and efficiency from the engine. The computer makes those decisions based on inputs from sensors in your engine. For example, the oxygen sensor tells your car’s computer if the engine is running rich or lean. If that sensor is bad, your engine could be running extremely lean which causes excess heat and could cause overheating. Besides fuel, ignition timing can cause overheating as well if it is unnecessarily retarded. Usually, your car can tell if you sensors are bad through the engine codes so reading these codes with a scanner can usually point you in the right direction. If you can’t find any engine codes, you can check things like fuel pressure regulators or cam and crank position sensors if you suspect a problem with your engine’s computer.

In the case of an overheating engine, of course, you also need to check your cooling system. Start by visually inspecting your radiator for damage. Make sure you’re checking your radiator, not the AC condenser and look for bent fins, debris and even places for air to escape in between your condenser and radiator. If lots of the fins are bent and blocking air flow, that could be what is causing a lack of heat transfer and overheating.

Next, think about the inside of your cooling system. Unusual amounts of fouling can reduce heat transfer and cause overheating so try reading our article about How to Flush a Radiator to make sure that isn’t your problem. Lastly, it’s worth thinking about the components like your water pump and thermostat. If your car has overheated before it’s possible that your thermostat is damage so you may consider replacing it.

One of the quickest ways to cool things down in your engine no matter what the circumstances are is to increase your coolant’s ability to transfer heat. That can be done quickly and easily by adding BlueDevil Engine Cool. BlueDevil Engine Cool reduces the surface tension of your coolant allowing it to more efficiently transfer heat away from your engine and into the radiator.

For more information about BlueDevil Engine Cool, visit our product information page!

You can also find BlueDevil Engine Cool at any of our partnering local auto parts stores like: