Thursday, August 18, 2005 - 07:14 pm, by: Roger Costello
Hi
My wife said her car A/C was not heating when stopped at the lights but worked again when she started moving. I said low coolant level and she said no warning light on the dashboard. Both 91 V8 Soarer's and Celsior's have a level sensor in the overflow tank which should tell you if the level is low. These often fail at about 10 years and start telling you coolant is low all the time. The float gets a bit waterlogged and sinks. New one's about $120 and an easy fix.
Anyway the normal failure mode is a low coolant warning, which her car did not have even though when I checked the overflow tank it was bone dry and the engine was at least 2 litres short of coolant. Interesting, I took the switch out to see that some plonker had wedged the float in the up position with a cable tie presumably to get rid of a spurious warning at some time in the past.
Watch out, whoever did this was probably not the only plonker in the world. It's worth checking the level switch works or checking the coolant level regularly. The level switch was deleted from 94 on for Soarers, I don't know about the Celsior.
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