It starting to get to that point in summer when we're having very hot days down here, and this year it seems my Maxima can't handle it. Yesterday it got up to 30C (86F, not as hot as some of you guys experience in your summer, but still hot) and I was driving through the city and was shocked to see the temp gauge right up just before that first line near the H line I turned off the A/C straight away and then it cooled back down to it's usual temp after about 5mins. Kept the A/C off for the rest of the day (ugh!) and it didn't overheat again.

I've been to 3 different places for advise and each gave me 3 different answers. One said that it could be the thermostat, but from reading the FAQ if it had failed it doesn't sound like it'd cool down and stay cool like it did. Second said that it could be leaking coolant, but I haven't noticed any water under where it's been parked. The last place, which was my local Nissan dealer, said that the radiator is most likely gunked up and needs to be flushed out. The last makes the most sense to me, it hasn't ever been flushed before.

Has anyone else had this happen before? What was the cause? I really wanna get this fixed ASAP, because at the moment I'm driving around an old R31 Skyline with no A/C and looks very boxy lol

 

i would start with the coolant its the cheapest /easiet one to do

 

Ok one thing (probably pretty important) that I hadn't considered were the belts. I had planned on replacing them as they're both pretty well worn, along with the belt retentioner as it's pretty wobbly and noisy. One of the belts obviously powers the water pump, and if the belts shoddy (as it is now) I persume this could cause the waterpump not to work as well as it should? I already picked up the smaller belt and the retenioner the other day (before the overheating occured) and had the larger one on order as the local dealer had run out, should be here Monday. Is this a likely cause? Would it be best to do the belts and then see if that fixes the problem before doing anything else? If it doesn't and it overheats again during testing, is this going to damage it? Sorry for the million questions lol, I just really don't want to damage my Max

 

im pretty sure the water pump is driven off the chain the belts drives

1) power steering
2)a/c, alternator

 

Ah I see. That pretty much means that the belts have absolutely nothing to do with the heating problem. Grr, I hate these problems when there could be many causes

 

Make sure the cooling fans turn on when your A/C runs.
Have the system serviced, coolant changed/flushed and the cap tested.

A faulty thermostat normally makes the car run to cool. When the thermostat spring gets weak, it opens to quickly and doesn't let the system get up to normal operating temp.

The water pump, driven off the timing chain will weep coolant when it fails. It's a vane type pump that doesn't wear out, the seals or bearings will fail before the pump stops circulating.

 

I'm willing to bet that it's the radiator fans that aren't coming on when the A/C is switched on. All of the other potential causes wouldn't make sense cus if they were bad the car would overheat all the time.

 

They're definetly coming on, because I looked under the bonnet at the time and they were spinning at top speed

 

Well, got it back from Nissan today and the problem was the radiator, it was 40% blocked Anyway, it's all flushed out now so should be like a new one, will be able to test it out tomorrow, suppose to get pretty hot. Learn from me, if you don't already get your radiator checked/flushed, do so before your summer comes on