Coolant Pressure D13 volvo

If you take the cap off without letting the coolant cool it is under pressure and will overflow. First thing is to do a pressure test of the coolant system. You can do it yourself, kit is cheap and can find how to do it easily enough online. It can be any number of things, head gasket is the worst case scenario. Could easily be a clamp leaking under pressure. Let us know how it works out and good luck.

 

Take a pop or water bottle and some string and tie it up so your overflow tube that rubs down the side of the rad is in it, now go for a drive and see if it fills.

Does both sides of your expansion tank have coolant in it?

 

How many miles? Might also want to look into the air compressor. Drain the wet tank with a white towel and see if it turns red from the coolant. Sometimes a bad head gasket on the compressor will over presurize the cooling system.

 

This is 100% true. I don't know the chain of events that lead to mine but whatever pressurized my coolant system on my d12d, took out my head gasket, my compressor head gasket and my water pump.

 

If you had the radiator recently changed, take a look at the pressure relief cap on the left side of the coolant reservoir. A lot of shops like to refill with a vacuum refiller, and they need to plug the relief cap when they do this. Typically, they'll either take an old relief cap which has failed in the past and plug it with silicone, or they'll plug the existing cap with a fastener of some sort and a clamp (Volvo typically attaches a runoff tube to their relief caps). If they forgot to do this, that could account for excess pressure. The coolant loss will be a matter of path of least resistance, and it may have punched through someplace where it was easier to do that since the relief cap was plugged. Just something worth checking out. Run into that problem a couple times with new trucks we'd received from the dealership, and the techs didn't undo whatever they did to plug the relief cap.

 

Are you sure you're loosing it? Or maybe overfilling it. Do you get low coolant warning?

 

I went through very similar problem. Truck was loosing 1-2 gal of coolant per week but there was not pressure in the system. First suspected was engine head but the problem was not there. Problem was in liners they found two bad liners with very small whole on them. After full engine overhauled problem was solved.

Good luck i hope yours will be easy to fix

 

I would check the egr cooler also, this leaks are hidden , coolant burns/vaporizes inside the engine.