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Engine coolant loss, steam under hood, most likely culprit?


mkoch
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A steaming cloud of coolant was emanating from under my air filter cover, passenger side, this evening!!

See photo for an approximation of what it looked like.   Coolant represented in green.

What is the most likely source of the leak? 

EA81-Engine-Bay-2.jpg

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The intake manifold has a coolant passage, along with the path for the intake.

The gaskets between the heads and the intake can fail, one way puts the coolant on top of the engine, the other, it gets sucked into the cylinders and burned.  Get the intake gaskets from a Subaru dealer.  The aftermarket ones are no where near as good.

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On 2/17/2022 at 6:44 PM, DaveT said:

The intake manifold has a coolant passage, along with the path for the intake.

The gaskets between the heads and the intake can fail, one way puts the coolant on top of the engine, the other, it gets sucked into the cylinders and burned.  Get the intake gaskets from a Subaru dealer.  The aftermarket ones are no where near as good.

In addition to the gaskets, I applied some grey silicon to each side of them.  So far, so good.  With a beast this old and unknown, I did that to the intake manifold gaskets, water pump gasket, and thermostat housing gasket in addition to greasing up the mounting bolts to prevent oxidation and fusing to the intake again.  Hopefully it's just overkill and not a future problem. 

+1 to pressure checking the system, make sure it's not the head gasket leaking coolant on top of the engine.

Good luck.

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