antifreeze freezing

Will full strength antifreeze freeze. My son put a jug in the freezer and it froze does that mean it is no good

Straight antifreeze will freeze. We had a drum of it freeze up at work. We did not use it after that. Not sure if it weakens it or not though. Boss did not want to take the chance.

Yes, straight antifreeze will freeze. When mixed with water the freezing point will go down. I mix mine 50-50 to get the freezing point far enough down to keep the radiator from freezing.
Freezing point of pure antifreeze

It might mean your freezer is set colder than necessary! I have heard that will happen, in N MN we mixed it 60-40, strong on the anti-freeze, with distilled water. You need to mix it in a container before pouring it in the cooling system, it won't mix very well in the cooling system. I would take a sample and mix it with water 50-50 and put it back in the same freezer and see what happens.

It will start getting slushy at 12 degrees F.
Never use pure antifreeze.

I guess you left your self a little wiggle room It wont mix very well ion radiator What makes you say that the engine system circulates the entire mix why in the earth would it not mix. I have never had any trouble with it mixing. Not to say take a half gallon of water and add half gallon of antifreeze is not better but saying it won't mix just got me.. LOL

It will not mix for a long time in a tractor with a thermo-siphon cooling system like a lot of older JD and small Farmalls.

Before the thermostat opens there is very little movement, and it won't mix, I have seen it happen! One time we changed a water pump on a skidder, and added some straight antifreeze, loaded it on the lowboy, and headed for the woods, 20 miles away. it was -30 F so we left it idle. When we got to the woods I unloaded it and went out and hooked onto a drag. As soon as it started working hard it overheated, the antifreeze in the radiator was gelled. We shut it off and covered it with a big tarp, and in an hour it was thawed out and all was OK.

DIM,

I will make a comment or two regarding antifreeze. I base my opinion on years ( decades) of laboratory analysis of antifreeze, both new and in use.

Do not use distilled water as a mix with full strength antifreeze....it is too pure an can/will leech metals from the wetted engine internals.

Brand new pre=mixed antifreeze says good to -40F, however, I sent new unused samples to the lab and the best was about -38F or so.

Use coolant after a real good flush or two, otherwise contamination is going to occur.

Use a testing method, the usual green antifreeze, even with additive chemistry lasts about 9 years in a diesel engine.

I recommend a long term tracking/analysis of your use, then you may adjust accordingly the maintenance interval. Things like high lead content of your coolant can indicate a breakdown of the radiator solder long before it happens.

D.

Never tried it, but have heard that before.

Was it solid or slushy?

I've heard that even if it does freeze it won't freeze solid, so it won't do damage or totally restrict flow.

I suspect freezing problems occur when there is still only water trapped in the block, the antifreeze is still in the radiator, because it didn't run long enough to circulate. It can take a long time sitting idling in cold weather.

Yea I've never seen a situation where if the motor was run after filling that the water and antifreeze didn't mix.

A guy learns something every day, that graph tells it all. For some side information, water is an interesting substance. Like all other compounds, as it cools it contracts (shrinks) EXCEPT for when it reaches it's freezing point (0 C or 32F), it expands. Many an engine block found that out the hard and expensive way. My high school chem teacher explained it all to us with molecular structure, etc. I believe he also said that water is the only compound on the planet that does that at its freezing point.

Well, it will mix within the system if you do things right. You just didn't do things right. It sounds as if you topped it off with straight antifreeze without any water. If the rest of the system was already 50/50 blended, its hard to tell how strong your blend ended up being after topping off with straight antifreeze. 80/20 perhaps, just guessing. This vary conversation is about straight antifreeze getting slushy in freezing temperatures.
When I worked in a mechanic shop, flushing the system was always done in conjunction with a coolant change. This was done by filling system with water and then draining several times. And then stick garden hose in radiator neck, with the drain open. Start engine and let run untill thermo opened a couple times, with hose and drain flowing water the entire time. Then shut engine off, shut water off, let it drain completely out the radiator drain, and then shut that off. Looked it up in the books to see what the system held. Added half that amount of straight antifreeze to the system and top off with water. Usually not much water was needed, since we didn't drain the straight water out of block. We avoided having to do this by knowing what the system held.
As a safety measure, we would let engine run untill thermostat opened 2 or 3 times. We did this to get air out of system. We would add water as air worked its way to top of radiator. You could tell if thermo was open by feeling how hot the top radiator hose was. Lastly, we would test for antifreeze strength. Never ever had a problem. We only checked for strength to ensure somebody didn't install a larger radiator or engine or something which would make book capacity not right.
Would of worked for you if you wouldn't of added straight antifreeze to the system and allowed it to run until the thermostat opened before taking it outside in 30 below zero temperatures. An engine has to run a long long time to open the thermostat when it is that cold.

Radiated the Fergie couple weeks back. I was kind of surprised how long for it to mix even after the thermostat opened.
JD

As a couple of others have mentioned and Barnyard's graph shows, any liquid (a solvent) that you add something (a solute) to will lower it's freezing point. This is called freezing point depression. So when you add water to pure antifreeze (ethylene glycol) you lower the ethylene glycol's freezing point from its pure freezing point of 9 degrees Fahrenheit. When you add ethylene glycol to water you lower it's freezing point. The minimum freezing point in Barnyard's graph is called a eutectic point. Water's property that Crazy Horse's chem teacher told him about was that upon freezing water forms a hydrogen bonded tetrahedral network that results in an increase in volume (i.e. decrease in density). The shape has to do with the number of outer (valence) electrons that oxygen has. However water is not the only substance that expands upon freezing, but there aren't many. There's at least one more, a metal, and if I remember correctly it is cesium.

This is the first time I ever heard to not use distilled water. In the past I've always used water straight out of the tap, but the water where we live now does have a lot of iron in it. So rather than risk filling my cooling system with all kinds of extra minerals, I started collecting the distilled water my dehumidifier puts out and using that.

Also, in my vehicles I used to always put in one gallon of straight anti freeze, then a gallon of water, then anti freeze again, etc. until it was full. Then start the vehicle and either drive it or let it idle till warmed up. Never had a problem. When I got my first two cylinder John Deere I was warned not to do that, due to the thermo-syphon system. So I began pre-mixing it and now do that on all my equipment. Also saves having to start it and run it afterward, as sometimes it's not always convenient to do that.

also. diesel anti-gel will gel up by itself but not mixed with diesel

Rich's Toys,

I learned the distilled water issue many years ago by a water chemistry company. I had the city water sampled, then had a custom resin bed filter system to produce hundreds of gallons of (purified/demineralized) water just for engine/antifreeze use.

Look around on the good old web, you'll find what I say to have merit.

D.

This makes perfect sense. It wont mix at an idle being hauled on a trailer. I have fone something like that but drove the truck at -25 and froze it up before I got a mile.

Quite a few years ago our oldest boy had a repair shop put a new radiator in his truck. They filled it with pure antifreeze. It froze/gelled up in the middle of nowhere in upstate NY at about 3:30 AM. He was lucky someone else was on that road and stopped to give a ride.

and my Case DC.

I am guessing you are talking about Ethylene Glycol antifreeze? It makes a difference. For instance,
Peak antifreeze is something else entirely.

P.S. At the Kubota service school, another thing they stressed was that 100 percent Ethylene Glycol as coolant would not cool an engine as well as a 50/50 mixture with water would.

After I had my car overheat because the radiater plugged up and I had to rod it out, I have been draining the antifreeze out in the summer and filling with distilled water. I figure that the distilled water will dissolve any deposits inside the radiator. I've done this for the last two years now and not too worried about it eating up any metal, but I've been wrong before. At least I haven't had a radiator plug up! I filter the old antifreeze thru a paper napkin before I put it back in. It filters out a quite a bit of slugy stuff. I can only filter a half a gallon till the napkin plugs up.

I call BS on the straight antifreeze freezing at above 0 We had a gallon that was new antifreeze 40 years ago setting outside on the ground. We moved it to put something there it was still liquid at -20 F. I've heard that old wives tale and never believed it. Due to the cost of full fill with straight antifreeze I do mix a half and half solution for radiators. When making a ten gallon mix for trucks the cost adds up pretty fast even bought by the barrel.