water gurgling???

Ask a garage to test for HC* (HydroCarbons) in the header tank. You probably have a head gasket leaking or a cracked / warped cylinder head.

• Testing for HC can be done using the MOT gas anayser. If a reading is present, then it shows that combustion gases have leaked from the combustion chamber into the cooling system.

would this have been done as part of the recent MOT last month?

Is the car loosing any water? If it's not, it's most likely a bit air trapped. Turn the heater to full and give it a good drive to get everything warmed up. It may be necessary to rebleed the system though as it's french (the french designers hadn't quite grasped the concept of a self bleeding cooling system at that point!)

Nope. The headgasket could be as shot as much as it wants. As long as it doesn't f*ck up the emissions test then they don't care.

No, they use the MOT gas anayser for its intended purpose to check the exhaust gases exiting from the usual place.

To me sounds like air in the water system.put heater on full and give it a good run down the motor way. from chris addlestone surrey

On most cars the heater matrix is permanently conected to the engine via two pipes. The heater control in the car controls a flap, not the actual flow of water to the matix. If the heater control in the car is a tap to control wter flow that is very interesting. It's almost as bad as Rapid Fit telling me they had to replace a thermostat to get a blocked heater matrix to work! The problem described tends to happen on older cars that have not been looked after too well. Most of the ones I saw suffered from owners not using antifreeze, then after a problem they put radweld in. This caused all the corrosion inside the engine to come away and glue together restricting the flow of water. The gurgling will be the water trying to get past a blocked heater matrix. You will notice towards the end of the year that the air temperture from the heater vents will get lower and lower until it packs in.

On 'most' cars. Peugeot were one of the manufacturers who used heater valves until quite recently, more so on their smaller cars where space was a concern (a little water valve takes up far less room than a air mixing flap).

That's rapid fit for you.

It may be blocked, but water only gurgles when there's air in it. I'd certainly be trying to bleed the system again before resorting to flusing anything.

My Renault Megane did this for months after I changed the coolant. I tried flushing out air bubbles by leaving the engine running with the heater turned on, etc, but it made little difference. It would make the noise when the engine was cold but stop doing so after it had been running for a while. It has now stopped making the noise of its own accord.