Quote:
Originally Posted by BudmanV24
The Water Wetter adds corrosion protection and reduces the surface tension of the water. If I'm not mistaken it's actually not too far off from dishwasher soap.
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"Water Wetter" is a cheap mix of surfactants that has been shown to often both lower the corrosion inhabitation of the OEM coolant, and then die off fairly quickly itself, leaving you with little, if any, corrosion protection. It was originally marketed in competition environments to lower the surface tension of pure water, which is fairly high as the molecule if extremely polar. Then the manufacture started marketing it as an additive for street cars (a much larger potential market), where unfortunately the coolant mix already has a fully chemically compatible and long lived surface tension modifier additive package of its own that obviously does not adversely react with the coolant package. Add in the fact that most people running pure water are doing so for other reasons (e.g.: race tracks hate anti freeze spills) and also tend to drain and refill they systems more frequently; and its utility on the street becomes even less obvious. A race car often has a cooling system fluid change several times a season, if not after every event.
Moving away from 50/50 coolant mixes to gain a heat transfer advantage is also somewhat of a fools errand because the real world actual differences are extremely small. You would gain a substantially greater degree of heat transfer capacity by going to a 160 degree thermostat and adding a third radiator of the car does not already have one.
The primary results are that the “lean” coolant mix needs to be changed more frequently, it will degrade the capability of the limited amount of coolant used, and could end up reacting with it in a way you did not expect; hardly an economic benefit in a car that is a pain to change the coolant in unless you have the vacuum charging system, which not everyone does. You might also be surprised how quickly the inside of one of these cooling systems gets nasty running a “lean” mix or only water and one of these "snake oil" surfactant mixes…………