Both Coolant & Tranny Fluid Are Now Red -- Clever

Taste it. Take a chug of coolant, swish and spit, so you know what youre looking for.

Errrrmmmm... If it were me, I'd be dipping a finger in the leak and seeing what it tasted like. Tranny-juice equals "nothing particularly good, but not particularly nasty, and rather oily and hard to get rid of", while radiator stuff is almost certainly going to be at least slightly (if not gaggingly) sweet.

Approximately 11/21/03 05:03, Don Bruder uttered for posterity:

Would this be a good time to ask if the car has power steering and therefore possibly *three* red fluids instead of two? Wonder what color the engine oil is.

Yeah, I'd just taste it. Transmission fluid does taste oily and sometimes with a bitter taste as well, and takes quite a bit to kill you. Power steering fluid is pretty close to this. Antifreeze is noticeably sweet if it has glycol and doesn't take nearly as much to kill you. Seriously, a small dab of any won't hurt you, particularly if you have a good beer available as mouthwash.

You might also want to take a good light and hope there is staining on some of the softer parts that might be a clue. e.g. a power steering hose with a very slow leak.

Yes. You're absolutely correct. In my car the power steering fluid

*IS* transmission fluid. So, they're exactly the same. I started to mention that in my post but I think PS fluid has been transmission fluid for a long time. A while back they added a different colorant (Green, if I remember correctly. ), but for my car they specify regular Dexron II.

The location of the leak it too far from the PS plumbing for it to be the source.

I guess I'll have to taste it, but given the state of my garage floor I was hoping for another answer.

Thanks for the replies.

Ken

Ken Hall wrote:

I'm guessing there's no way to do a chemical analysis of the stain on the floor due to a general lack of sufficient material to test, but if there were, it seems like simply checking the soluability of the chemical in water would answer your question. I would expect (and hopefully I'm not incorrect on this assumption) that engine coolant would dissolve in water just fine, whereas ATF wouldn't dissolve at all... I don't mix ATF in water often (or at all, honestly) but I would tend to believe it'd ball up and swirl around in the water instead of dissolving. Maybe putting water onto the stain would reveal something? If it's an ATF soaked stain, the water might bead up on the surface and sit there as opposed to soaking in if it were engine coolant. Again, I'm no chemist, so this is just a mildly educated guess.

Personally, when I have mystery leaks, I use a different method of tracking them down. First thing I do is get a clean surface that is stain free, either by washing the ground (painted floors help immensely in that regard) or by putting down a large amount of light colored paper big enough to cover the entire floor beneath the vehicle that is held together in some fashion so it won't scatter about. Next I park the car on the clean surface, and let it sit there for as long as it takes to collect some good solid leaks. After that, right before moving the car, I clearly mark on the surface where the tires contact the ground so that they can be used as reference points. I move the car, then using the aforementioned reference points I carefully measure distances from the tires to the stains. This is not done as a straight line measure, however; I first measure parallel to a line that would be created by connecting the two reference points made by the front tires, taking note of the distance from one of the reference points to a point where I would be in line with the stain. I then measure the distance from that point to the stain using a line perpendicular to the line between the front wheels. After all that, I have myself a fairly accurate indication of the spot underneath the car from which the drop of liquid fell. Next time I'm under the car, I can use those measurements to find the spot.

Granted, this does not give you the location of the leak, just the spot where the liquid collected before falling. However, you can usually then look at that area and follow the liquid to its source. Especially in the case of just trying to distinguish between coolant and ATF... this method should get you in the ballpark well enough to decide. Unless of course the leak is coming from the radiator at the transmission cooler... but, in that case, you should at least be able to follow the leak back up to the source and check. Or, perhaps you could then place a clean tray underneath the leak and collect a large enough amount of liquid to perform some kind of chemical analysis on it. It would also make the "taste test" more accurate as there would be no other contaminants from the garage floor to confuse the taste. Alternately, if you have enough of the stuff, a smell test might suffice. Or you could heat some of it and see what it smells like... burning ATF smells quite different from burning coolant. I'm not too fond of the idea of tasting the things that come out of my car.

One trick I've heard for leak detection is to dust the area in question with baby powder or corn starch heavily enough to get a nice light colored surface going. Then wait a while, and come back to see the fresh trails made through the powder by the leak. Supposedly this works remarkably well as the fluid will literally draw a distinct trail in the powder that you can follow back to the exact point of the leak. I've also been told that cleaning the area off thoroughly before applying the powder is beneficial, if not entirely necessary... other dirt in the area can mask the effect, plus sometimes the dirt is slowing the rate of the leak down to the point where detection is nearly impossible. With this trick, not only do you not have to taste any fluids, but you get the added benefit of knowing where the leak is coming from so that you can plug it!

Hopefully some of my above blather will provide an alternative to you... I wouldn't want to taste it either, especially after it came off the garage floor. But if that becomes the only alternative, I would suggest you taste it, then immediately run inside and rinse your mouth out well with running water BEFORE swallowing ANY of it. While I doubt you'd reach any level of toxicity of the automotive fluids with just a taste like that, how can you be certain there's nothing else nasty on the garage floor? Old bug spray, perhaps? Pet urine? Other household chemical spills? It just seems like a small effort to make in the name of safety. But maybe it won't come to that... I hope it doesn't, since licking fluids of the garage floor is a pretty yucky sounding thing!

Just pour a little water on each of your test spots. They should respond differently! Mike

How about dribbling a little bit of tap water onto the spot on the floor? If the tap water "beads" and rolls away, its transmission fluid. If the tap water mixes with the leaked fluid, then it has to be coolant.

To any who may be interested. I had not seen their message, but I did pretty much as Steve, Mike and The Hurdy Gurdy Man suggested.

I put a clean white plate under the car where it was dripping and after 3-4 days I'd collected enough fluid to run the test. I dripped water on the fluid and it mixed almost immediately -- conclusion, coolant.

To be sure this would work, before beginning the process I ran a test by putting dabs of transmission fluid and then coolant on a plate. When I dripped water on each, the oil caused the water to bead and the coolant mixed.

Ken

Reading the replies to the original post, I think I've uncovered an explanation for some of the kidney failure we heard about. Antifreeze is deadly poisonous in small amounts. Don't put it in your mouth, even if you're going to rinse immediately afterwards. Drip water on it, as Ken suggests, below.

Henry

Ken Hall wrote: