This broke on the drive home today (2000 Sprinter 208) and dumped all the water out of the system.
I bypassed it with an old sparkplug socket I had. This now means the heater core is always getting water circulating through it.
Does this matter? I live in a hot country so I never have the cabin heater on so it’s not like I’m missing out on owt…
Long ago, in the Before Times, when cars didn’t have heater shutoff valves we would put one inline - just a simple brass ball valve.
You want this, otherwise there will always be airflow across the heater core that will get heated up.
IME, just having the coolant flowing in a heater core leaches a pretty good amount of heat into the cabin. I have shutoffs on my tractors and heavy trucks for summer use to completely close the flow off to the heater or I’ll sweat my ass off.
So with said fix, the temp was sitting just under 80 the rest of the way home (about an hour’s drive). It usually is over, mebbies around 85?
Now, the strange bit was that none of the vents were blowing hot. I even cracked up the heat and put the blowers on max and it was still cold(ish) air.
Does that mean the heater core could be blocked/fucked/absent??
I doubt it’s absent, but if you’re not getting heat, then yah, maybe the core is blocked. My cousin was having trouble with heat on his Tundra, put in a new heater core and it was blocked off within days. We took it out and cut it apart and some goop had immediately closed off flow. Still mystified what reaction built the goop, maybe incompatible coolant types.
Could be head gasket repair? Either shop bought or just plain old egg white.
Replacing the heater core is a bit of a ball ache innit?
I’m almost ready to put everything back and ignore it for a while
It should be fine in terms of not damaging anything. The only downside is that it will heat the cabin somewhat until you replace it.