First of all.. Can the coolant disappear or evaporate? because my coolant tank is EMPTY the radiator has some but not the coolant tank, also i need to know if i could mix it with water because i have to do a pretty long trip later today. and a near by pepboys or western auto is almost not an option.. of course if i could drive with what i got i will.

Thanks..

 

First of all, coolant is sold diluted or full strength. Your choice.

Second, it will not usually just disappear. Ingested in the engine or leaked on to the ground are the two most common. Just refill your system including the reservoir with 50/50 mix and take your trip for now.

 

coolant does come pre-mix and non-mix. i think the pre-mix cost a little bit more and if you don't want to spend the extra money, just use a 50:50 ratio of water:coolant. If you are in doubt about your coolant, just do a flush because you do not want your car to break down in the middle of nowhere(seen it in a lot of movies lol) It only cost a few bucks to change the coolant anyways. check the stickies for info on how to change the coolant.

 

make sure that it is DISTILLED water. You can run your car on DISTILLED water alone without the actual coolant, just dont really know how far you can travel but far enough. Prob at least a good 1 1/2 hours or driving on the highway, not local. But since you still have coolant, just pour distilled water in there. But now you have more water than coolant, so you might now have to do a coolant flush afterwards.

note:
Reason why you use distilled water is because reg water usually have minerals and can/will rust your radiator. Distilled water does not and will not rust your radiator

 

I agree that you should use distilled water.

You can run the car on water alone, you just have to hope it does not freeze at night. I do not recomend this but if you need to get drive around a little bit before you can get coolant there is not a problem with just adding water. You add coolant/antifreeze so that the water will not freeze and and expand causing something to break.

 

Check to make sure you don't have a dead radiator fan. I kept losing fluid out of the reservoir and couldn't figure out why until I saw the driver's side fan wasn't working. The car might have run a hotter on a warm day, and some of the fluid burned away. It had never lost any fluid until the motor burned out. No problem now that I've changed the motor.

 

still check to see if the radiator is leaking, i remember when i had a ford taurus, i had that same problem where my coolant tank will be empty after 8hrs+ of fill up, and my mechanic said that my radiator was leaking even though after my tank was empty there was still some in the radiator... i could also drive around with what i had in my radiator for days, maybe weeks but as soon as i fill the tank, it'll be gone in no time, or you can check if your tank itself is leaking or if there is a hole in the radiator hose... PM me and tell me if i helped

 

Could have air in the system. Purge all of the air out.

 

Coolant could be leaking out of hoses, holes in the radiator or radiator seam joints, via the waterpump or could be being burned by the engine due to a leaky headgasket. It may not be obvious when the engine is cold. I'd check after the engine has been running for a while. Of course never remove the radiator cap when the engine is hot. I once had a 94 maxima that had a sloooowwww leak from the waterpump. It eventually began to run hot one Winter evening because it had slowly been leaking fluid which I hadn't noticed. antifreeze helps prevent rust and freezing, normally in a 50-50 ratio so that northern USA has winter protection-If you live in puerto rico you could probably go 30% coolant, 70 percent water. So don't worry about topping it off with water, it probably won't be too diluted, but you'd want to get it checked by a mechanic with an antifreeze concentration testing device.