Engine Coolant, Car Coolant & Antifreeze

Antifreeze / Engine Coolant

Making sure that your engine's cooling system is filled with a high quality antifreeze / coolant is vital for its life span and healthy running. Antifreeze is essential to keeping your car running smoothly during the cold winter months AND the warm summer months... read on!

What is Antifreeze?

Antifreeze is an additive that has TWO purposes. The first is the most commonly known, which is to lower the freezing point of the water in your car's engine cooling system, preventing the water from freezing when the mercury drops. If the water is allowed to freeze, it could damage your engine once it's heated up, resulting in costly repairs. The main purpose of antifreeze is to prevent a rigid enclosure from bursting due to expansion when water freezes.

What many people don't know however, is that antifreeze is also used to increase the boiling point of engine coolant to prevent it from overheating, thus protecting your engine from corrosion and aiding heat transfer. So antifreeze also helps to protect your vehicle from unwanted damage to radiators and other components.

There are two main types of antifreeze: concentrated and ready mixed. While concentrated needs to be diluted before it can be used, ready mixed is, as the name suggests, ready to use straight away - ideal for topping up while on the road.

Commercially, both the additive (pure concentrate) and the mixture (diluted solution) are called antifreeze, depending on the context. Careful selection of an antifreeze can enable a wide temperature range in which the mixture remains in the liquid phase, which is critical to efficient heat transfer and the proper functioning of heat exchangers.

Most commercial antifreeze formulations include corrosion inhibiting compounds, and a colored dye (commonly a fluorescent green, red, orange, yellow, or blue) to aid in identification. A 1:1 dilution with water is usually used. Automotive antifreeze has a characteristic odor due to the additive tolytriazole, a corrosion inhibitor.

Opie Oils wide choice of antifreeze comes in both forms, so it's up to you to pick which you prefer.

What is Antifreeze used for?

Most automotive engines are water-cooled to remove waste heat, although as explained above, the water is actually antifreeze/water mixture and not plain water. The term engine coolant is widely used in the automotive industry, which covers its primary function of convective heat transfer for internal combustion engines. Antifreeze was developed to overcome the shortcomings of water as a heat transfer fluid.

On the other hand, if the engine coolant gets too hot, it might boil while inside the engine, causing voids (pockets of steam), leading to localized hot spots and the catastrophic failure of the engine. If plain water were to be used as an engine coolant, it would promote galvanic corrosion. Proper engine coolant and a pressurized coolant system can help obviate the problems which make plain water incompatible with automotive engines.

Maintaining your cars antifreeze level

Once antifreeze has been mixed with water and put into use, it periodically needs to be maintained. If engine coolant leaks, boils, or if the cooling system needs to be drained and refilled, the antifreeze's freeze protection will need to be considered. In other cases a vehicle may need to be operated in a colder environment, requiring more antifreeze and less water.

In the absence of leaks, antifreeze chemicals such as ethylene glycol or propylene glycol may retain their basic properties indefinitely. By contrast, corrosion inhibitors are gradually used up, and must be replenished from time to time. Most automotive manufacturers recommend periodic complete replacement of engine coolant, to simultaneously renew corrosion inhibitors and remove accumulated contaminants.

Why buy from Opie Oils?

It's always important to double check which antifreeze your car requires too, before making a purchase - if you're not sure what to go for, contact the team at Opie Oils who will be delighted to help!

More Information

Want to know more about what the antifreeze does in a car or what is the engine coolant? Have a read of our Coolant / Antifreeze Information that outlines exactly what makes a good Coolant / Antifreeze and how they're produced, plus lots more.