Hey guys

I have only just noticed this today but the needle on my temp guage usually sits right in between the M and the A, today once warm the needle would fluctuate between smack in the middle of M and down just below the A and back up again all within a minute driving at a constant speed of say 60kph.

The thermostat was changed around 1500k's ago so its weird that this has just started to happen now. I mean if it happened straight after the swap it would obviously be the thermostat wouldn't it??

I have read a previous thread from a few years back where someone mentioned a similar problem and solved it by drilling a small hole in their thermostat (they too had recently replaced their thermo).
Can anyone back if that this is the way to fix my problem???

Thanks for any help!!

Damien

did you bleed out all of the air. i had this problem when i did the head gasket on my ed. turned out to be some air bubbles in the cooling system

yeah definately no air in the system. i guess if there was it would be doing it from day 1 since i replaced the thermostat right?

cheers!

true, if its not fluctuating from 1 end of the guage to other then i spose it just means that the thermostat is opening and closing at its set temp. so in effect its working fine really

hmmm yeah i guess i am a little concerned because it has always sat in the 1 spot and never moved and all of a sudden it started moving around heaps...

Has the weather just cooled off where you live? That could be why it's going down more often.

okay so here is the update

i bought another thermostat (same as the original, tridon) and this time removed the tab for the hole.
put it in and it did fix the moving around problem but.... the car took a HEAP longer to get up to running temp and once there sat a little bit lower then it did before.

So then i went and bought another thermostat (the same tridon one) and this time left the tab in. it came up to running temp much quicker this time but once up dropped way back down again to below the L. It only did this once (which i later figured was just all the freezing cold coolant sitting in the radiator) and then slowly hovered over the A until it sat in its normal position.

So in conclusion it was partly because of a dodgy thermostat (it would do what the newest one did the first time, every time- swinging heaps after how ever long of driving) and partly because of the colder weather. I guess that is what happens when you only drive your car once a week! a week is enough for a climate change!!

cheers for all the help felas

damien

I drove my EB GLi again today and checked the guage and found that the 1/3 mark is the 'L'. The 'M' is the halfway mark. If your car spends most of its time between the A and M, or on the M, then by my experience it has a problem.

In most cars even when towing in the heat of summer, i would not expect the temp to get to half, and if it did i would consider that something is wrong. To go to half in easier conditions is even worse.

The more of a problem there is with the cooling system, the more the guage will swing around. When the cooling system is good, it has the power to keep things in tight check.

A common issue is a blocked radiator. Also check the thermos are working when they should.