Cleaning new radiator questions

JohnTedd

JohnTedd

JohnTedd

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Joined
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Location
West London
I've read the stickie on radiator cleaning and I have started the process. The vinegar is currently in the radiator at the moment, but I have some questions and concerns...

1. My radiator has 4 inlet/outlets. Three of them have G1/4 plugs in them and the other has a compression joint. In all cases there are rubber O-rings in these. Should I be worried about the vinegar attacking the rubber?

2. I am thinking of connecting up my pump to help shift some of the muck from the radiator. Is this a good/bad idea?

Thanks in advance for your advice.

John
 
I did one 6 hour soak with neat vinegar, followed by an 8 hour soak in de-ionized water. Here's the liquid after the soak (the vinegar one is on the right):

radiator-cleaning.jpg


I then connected the pump for an hour or two with more de-ionized water. Afterwards the water was pretty clear. However once I drained it all down I examined the plugs and their ends were all discoloured. Is this normal. Here's a really poor photo of them. The middle right one is new, whereas the others have all been soaking with the radiator:

plug-after-vinegar.jpg


Do I need to do anything to clean these? Are they OK?

Thanks in advance
 
Thanks for the reply Oldphart, but as I said right at the start of my original post, I have read the cleaning guide and was following it.

I'm largely through it now but I was concerned about the state of my blanking plugs. There were originally silver-looking, but now they look like tarnished copper. Perhaps this is natural after having a vinegar bath, but I would like to know if anyone else has an opinion on this, and whether anyone else has seen it too.

John
 
Hi again, l used distilled vinegar which was clear, just a thought did you use Brown vinegar perhaps? that may cause the tarnishing on your plugs.
 
I think you have overdosed on the vinegar tbh. The green colour is a giveaway that you have actually dissolved some of the brass in the rad. Still, as long is it is not leaking then then it should still work ok.

Plus, you'd best be absolutely sure you have got every last bit of vinegar out of anything that has come into contact with it. Re-circulating a volume of de-ionised is probably not enough, you will have just diluted whatever quantity of vinegar remained in the rad when you emptied it, thus you will have left some diluted vinegar in the rad when you emptied the de-ionized out. You would have to do this multiple times to get every last trace of vinegar out, or my prefered method would be to continuously flush it with running water from the tap, letting the water go down the plug hole.

As for the plugs, you can't really see from the photos but I guess the vinegar has stripped some of the nickel coating revealing the brass underneath? Again, this is fairly cosmetic, as long as the O rings are still ok it shouldn't be a problem. Give them a good scrub too.
 
Googled how to remove tarnish from metals -

Heinz Ketchup. Just pour ketchup all over the copper. Let it sit for five to ten minutes, then wipe clean. You won't believe your eyes. The acids from the tomatoes along with the acetic acid from the vinegar magically cleans the tarnish fro...

LoL > got to be worth a try.;)
 
Thanks for all the replies. I will make sure that I properly flush out the rad via the tap. I was concerned about introducing limescale into the system given that our tap water is pretty hard, but quite a few have suggested it so I'll give it a go tonight and then make a final flush with de-ionized water.

The o-rings look OK to me and they are still watertight.

I will give the tomato sauce a go on one of the plugs tonight too.

Thanks
John
 
I tried putting tomato ketchup on the plug, but it made no difference, so perhaps it's not tarnished as much as stripped.

I connected the rad up to the tap and left it running for a while and then rinsed it with de-ionized water so hopefully it is good to go now.

Thanks for all the advice

John
 
For future reference you really shouldn't need to use vinegar now as most rads use water soluable flux which hot water will remove. Vinegar and Tomato ketchup do the same thing, they are both mildly acidic and thats why they are used to clean tarnished metal. Looking at your plugs it appears the nickel plating has been stripped revealing copper underneath. You should have absolutely no worries with that as most metals in a waterllop will be copper or close to it in the metalurgy table (brass, ,tin, nickel etc).
 
w3bbo said:
For future reference you really shouldn't need to use vinegar now as most rads use water soluable flux which hot water will remove.
Click to expand...

Perhaps it's time to get the stickie updated then!

As you say, though, I don't think removing the coating is going to do too much harm as all the metal in my loop will be copper or copper alloys.
 
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