Tips to Avoid Over Heating
If you are going on a long and time consuming car journey across the country perhaps where you need to stay on a motorway for hours and hours on end, your car engine is going to become very hot. If you are driving long enough and fast enough this may cause your car to over heat. When your car starts to give off the signs that it is over heating there are a range of different things that you can do to cool it using some standard garage tools.
Pull Over
First and foremost you should pull over somewhere safe and turn off the car engine. Even if you are in a rush and do not want to pull over it is best advised to do so, if you keep driving whilst the car is showing signs of over heating it could push it over the edge. If you are on the motorway you can pull over onto the hard shoulder and stop.
As a car over heating is seen as an emergency you are legally allowed to stop on the hard shoulder. Make sure when you do pull over you are somewhere safe and are able to get out of your car without posing a risk to the other cars driving past. Once you have stopped you should turn off your engine immediately. This will allow the engine to start cooling straight away and prevent it from getting any hotter.
After you have done this, push or pull any trigger in the car which is going to pop open the hood, get out and open the hood of your car. By opening up the hood of your car you are exposing the hot engine of the car to cool air. At this point you are probably going to the feel the heat emitting from the car engine on your face and body. It is important at this point that you do not touch the engine as it will be very hot and could burn you.
To help assist the car in cooling down further you should now check whether the coolant tank is full or not. If it is not, ideally you will have some coolant fluid stored somewhere in your car to fill the tank back up. If you are short on coolant fluid, using water will do just fine.
Disperse the Heat
As stated before you should always pull over when your car starts to over heat, however if you are in position where you must keep driving there are still a few things you can do to cool the car down. A common mistake that people often do when their car is over heating is to turn the air conditioning on. This is a mistake, turning the air conditioning on means the engine is being used more, so you should turn it off along with anything else that may be using the engine unnecessarily.
Next turn your vents on but turn them onto hot rather than cold. When you turn your car vents on and turn it up to hot, the car will use the engine heat as a means to warm up the air coming out of the vents. By turning the vents up to hot your engine is going to disperse some of the heat around it and move it into the inside of the car. Unfortunately this might mean you will get very hot with the heat from the vents and your air conditioning system off, but these are some of the only tips to avoid over heating your engine you can take whilst you are still driving.