Afraid of the answer.....

[Austinsweet01]

Ok-here is my story and my ultimate question-hopefully in a nutshell. I usually consult past posts on this forum when tying to trouble shoot, this is my first quest for actual advice/info/expert opinion

So I had my local guy replace my water pump mid November. It was an obvious diagnosis-turned out it had disentigrated and the blade was pretty much shredded like most impellers in these old gals. Opted to go ahead and replace thermostat at the same time, upgraded that a bit, had some hoses replaced, necessary seals, connectors, etc since we were in there...
I felt comfortable with a few really good engine flushes as we were able to get almost a complete impeller from the pieces-felt that what was left was most likely going to get shredded to bits and given the history...I feel good about it. Anyway-get her back and she is dropping some liquid. After scouring the forum I realize that it might be a pressure issue.

The long and short of it. After my attempts at bleeding and re-bleeding I am first convinced that I still have a leak-probably some additional hosing that needs to be replaced or perhaps a cracked water resevoir. Every 2-3 days, I drop approx. 1/2 a gallon of what appears to be only the distilled water that I am topping off-not coolant...although I feel like I can smell a little bit of coolant after a good drive.

I've been dealing with this, biding my time for the last couple of months-just topping off-making sure that my resoviour is not low-planning to get her back to my guy to trouble shoot the remaining issue.

Very late on Sunday after a less than climatic superbowl-I am heading home and go to top off my water resevoir and accidentally overfill-it's crazy dark and my friend is slow on the draw with the cell phone flash light. Anyway-it's the first time with an over fill since the work has been done. I shrug it off saying-it's going to leak out fairly quickly anyway. Here's the rub-it's now Tuesday night, and NO CHANGE IN WATER LEVEL!!!

What the heck-could that really have been the problem? Could a pressure issue really have resulted in a coolant/water leakage issue of 1/2 gallon per each 2-3 days? Oh and also my engine light HAD come back on about 5 weeks after the work was completed only to go off on it's own about 4 weeks after that ( which was like 2 weeks ago).

Thoughts? PS. Thank you for taking the time to read and hopefully to respond and PPS. I love my Porche!

[robdelorenzo]

I also had a bleeder valve go bad. It took a while for it to get bad enough to where I could actually see the leakage around the valve. Until that happened, it would spray out a fine mist of coolant under a certain pressure and then stop when the engine was shut off and the pressure dropped. The crack had to get wide enough to be seen in action to find it. Try a pressure test. Auto Zone will loan you a tester if you don't have one.

[Austinsweet01]

Thanks robdelorenzo.
I will definately try to tackle the pressure test-I'm intimidated by auto-projects that have more than about 10 steps but the pressure test sounds like something I might be able to brag about having done myself .
I am trying not to be too optomistic-at this point-about the dry spot under my car in case I start seeing evidence of leakage again.

To give an idea of how significant the leaking was-this is what I'd find each day at 5pm. My officeparking spot is on a slight incline which I guess was allowing the liquid to drain from the under-carriage cover...