My girlfriend has an L reg 1.4 Energy Clio, absolute trooper of a car.
However, about 6 months ago it started to lose a bit of coolant. Over the space of a couple of weeks the header tank will empty. Because we were living far apart I wasn't able to look at it so she has been dutifully topping it up ever since. More recently having moved in together I have tried to find the leak, replaced hose clips, crawled all over and under it looking but to no avail - the engine is all too grubby to see where it might be going and I'm not about to start cleaning it. There's a chance that it's the headgasket of course but changing it is effort, time and money so i wont be doing that unless i actually see water and oil mixing. My will to continue fiddling about/getting messy and spending money has reached its end so I decided to do what most of us would do now (and some of us would have done long ago) -
bodge it!
The patient:
As you can see, it's a highly cherished and very well looked after beast, washed and polished and pampered every weekend etc. <ahem>
We have all heard of these leak fixing products and the associated horror stories of blocked heater matrices and water galleries etc. but realistically the heater doesnt work very well anyway and I dont really care about the other consequences.
The usual suspect (Radweld) was considered but I decided to give a product called K-seal a go. On the
website and back of the bottle they make some pretty bold claims about what this stuff can do - sealing cracks in engine blocks, fixing headgaskets and so on. I am highly skeptical about that to put it mildly but I'm hoping it can at least seal a small leak from the rad or whatever.
So off I went to the factors to get my bottle of K-seal. Much smaller bottle than I was expecting. Smells rank and has copper particles floating around in it. Shake it up and it looks a bit like chocolate milkshake (but don't drink it kids, it doesn't taste nice). Note the environmental warnings and monogram of a dead fish on the back, always a good sign for product functionality I reckon.
I just tipped it in the header tank and topped up to level with a bit of coolant (in my case, plain water - can't risk proper antifreeze until I know it's not going to disappear). Apparently the leak will stop within 2-3 minutes of the engine reaching operating temperature (or slightly longer in this application because it's gone in the header tank) but we will have to wait a week or so to see if the header tank has lost any coolant to know if it has worked. Watch this space.