Questions about Amsoil ANT Propylene Glycol

[03cvpi]

I have some questions about Amsoils' ANT Propylene Glycol Antifreeze. I haven't sent an email to Amsoil yet, I wanted to sound it out here first. I just switched over a 97 Escort to the Amsoil ANT and have noticed a few things. The car was flushed with distilled water using a gravity tank and a flush tee in the return heater line. Then the 4 1/2 quarts of ANT was added to the tank and allowed to pour into the vehicle. A small amount escaped throught he filler neck after displacing the distilled water and the system was closed up and run until warm. This should have provided a 60% solution when fully mixed. The car was driven for a few days and then the antifreeze was tested, it came in at 20% soultion on a snap on ball tester and 40% on a refractometer. After a little calculation 8 oz of ANt was added to bring the solution to 60%. The car was driven a few more days and the antfreeze was tested again 30% on the ball tester and over 70% on the refractometer. I would think the water pump would be the best mixer. Now jump to this evening, I had to replace the thermostat as it was acting erratic. I drain all the coolant from the engine short of pulling the block plugs and it still tested at over 70%, then I sucked all of the antifreeze out of the coolant recovery bottle and it tested as almost pure ANT, it went beyond the scale of the meter which tops out at 88%. I have now added both fluid together and balanced with mixture to 63% which will give me freeze protection to -55f. We will see how it tests in a few days. The questions I have are:

1. Is PG that hard to get a good reading off of, I have tried 5 different ball testers and none read the same, from 20% to 80% off of the same sample. The 3 refractometers we have are within 1%.

2. I know antifreeze is colloidal and mixes with water, but does PG have a tendancy to seperate out more the EG. When I was balancing the solution in the drain pan, you could see the added distilled water make some neat swirls within the PG before it fully mixed.

3. Is this a problem with only Amsoils ANT or does it effect all manufacturers.

Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks!

 

[tom slick]

have you mixed a seperate 50% or 60% solution of PP glycol and double checked that your refractometer is cal'd correctly for it?
ball tester is only accurate for the specific gravity of traditional green PE glycol solution.
are you correcting for temperature?

 

[Steve S]

There are test strips for the propylene glycol antifreeze.

 

[03cvpi]

All three refractometers are accurate to within about 1% and all give the same reading. The meters have three scales EG, PG and Battery Acid. Just to be sure we checked calibration on the refractometers with distilled water. The ball type, even from snap on don't seem to give reliable readings. The ball testers we have are for PG (Snap On Model AF109)and they will give different readings off of the same sample sometimes. Temp correction is not necessary with the refractometers, with the ball type, it is done with a chart, but the difference from hot to cold on the chart is only about 2%. We are only having problems with the ball type, we use them for checking the water cooled compressor antifreeze, but may throw them out in favor of the refractometer. I just don't want to be lugging a 200.00 meter into a crawl space to check fluid condition.

 

[03cvpi]

I have tried the test strips from Amsoil and from prestone and neither one really is that accurate, +/- 6% is about the test strip accuracy.

 

[tom slick]

but did you check with a known 50% solution to see if it actually reads 50%? Maybe a 50% solution of ANT reads as 70%.

 

[03cvpi]

Yes we tried 40, 50 60 & 70% solutions and all worked well with the refractometers, the ball type where all over the map. As a matter of fact, we found the carquest PG tester the worst of all, it would only float 3 of five balls at 100% pure ANT and if left alone for several minutes only one ball would be floating. The snap on AF109 had 3 of 4 balls floating at pure ANT.

What we can't figure out is how the ANT mixture seems to get stronger by itself, like the water is settling out of the mixture. What we noted on the Escort was that when the solution was mixed to 65% after about a week the radiator read about 70% and the fluid in the recovery bottle was almost pure ANT and there was no perceptible drop in the coolant level which kind of leads us to think the water is not staying mixed with the ANT.

 

[Boomer]

It coluld be that the balls are slowly being solvated by the PG. It is a little less polar than EG and may therefore absorb into the balls, changing their density over time. As a chemist, I would certainly recommend the refractometer over the flaoating ball unit.

Are you using distilled water or tap water with a lot of minerals? How long did you let the flush water go throught the system? Is it possible that pockets of old antifreeze solution were still in the block or radiator?

 

[03cvpi]

A refractometer is all I can use, every ball type one we used was all over the map. We used distilled water from a gravity tank and also pulled the block drain plug on the back side, the thermostat housing and eventually the lower radiator hose.We used roughly 35 gallons of distilled water to flush the block, radiator and the heater core. It was as clean as we could get it.

PG at a 60% solution has some strange thermal properties. The car now runs at 188 degress with a 195 thermostat and seems to hit a wall at 208 degrees in it's ability to shed heat. Is that normal.

 

[joaks]

Have you heard back from amsoil yet?