Water pumps are designed to prevent your car’s component from overheating, especially the engine. Your car has a gasoline combustion engine that might get overheated due to excessive driving. Keep the engine at its optimal state, and these pumps keep circulating water frequently through the engine.
These pumps use an impeller to drive the coolant. The impeller is mounted on one end of the impulse pump shaft. That circulates water through the engine and the cylinder head, heater core, radiator, connecting hoses, and intake manifold.
Some positive displacement pump bearings support the water pump pulley of the central shaft. It transfers scrolling force to the impeller and influences the fluid circulation flow. However, your vehicle might have a serpentine belt, drive belt, or timing belt, depending on its make and model, to operate the pump.
A bad water pump is the main reason for your engine to overheat. This can even lead to pumps leakage. Although the bearing assembly is isolated from the coolant by a shaft seal, a weep hole or relief port allows the coolant flow to exit when needed. The weep holes are usually located at the bottom or one side of the water pump shaft housing.
It may seem challenging to figure out the water pump’s condition due to its hard-to-reach location on the engine. Well, whatever the pump’s state be, you can test it very quickly without any professional mechanic’s help.
Diagnosing A Failed Water Pump Can Be Tricky
Water pump failure is a dreadful repair task, so most people don’t like to diagnose it. Although finding out the pump’s condition is not a difficult job, but it isn’t something funny either. You will notice specific warnings when your vehicle’s water pump goes bad.
If you understand some potential clues regarding the pump’s problem, you may replace a few components. But get to understand the problem first when you apply fixes without knowing that can make things more complicated. Then it can be pretty dangerous and costly to repair for applying those wrong fixes.
So, make sure to diagnose the pump by a mechanical expert. Otherwise, you can face a complete engine failure for this issue.
However, in this article, we have shared some guidelines to understand when your water pump goes bad. Besides, you can rely on these related methods to test what condition the pump is in. It doesn’t require any heavy tools most of the time unless the pump needs any replacement.
Nevertheless, there are some special tools for such troubleshooting problems that might ease the work for you.Keep in mind that before you perform the troubleshooting task, or test the water pump, get to acknowledge the configuration and operating process of your car.
Testing A Bad Water Pump
You should follow some necessary diagnostic procedures when it comes to checking for a bad water pump. And you also need to know about bad water pump noise. This can help you understand the pump’s fault and the type of fixes it needs.
Other than that, you should get other parts of your car to be tested. This helps you to understand if anything needs to be fixed before a new pump installation. Figuring out the pump’s failure due to other parts of the car is another advantage of this approach.
Therefore, get to acknowledge a car’s mechanism, start diagnosing the fault, and perform troubleshooting based on the diagnosis.
Here, we have shared some of the methods you can apply until you can pinpoint the causes of a pump failure.
Diagnosing Water Pump Seal Failure
Some vehicles give easy access to their parts like the engine and pump. Therefore, you can provide a simple visual inspection to understand if the seal or gasket has any leakage. On the other hand, some vehicles are designed in such a way that they need to remove the engine front cover to inspect the pump. You can employ a mechanic to perform the task for you in that case.
- If you want to test the water pump assembly yourself, first get to understand your car’s mechanism. Once you get to the pump, check on the pump weep hole, the shaft, or the pulley. It would be best if you used a flashlight to examine the pump correctly.
- Don’t forget to check on the mounting area, radiator hose, gasket, and seal for any damage. The connecting part of the pump with the engine block is the mounting position. And the radiator hose is another essential component that attaches to the water pump. So, make sure to test these two parts carefully.
- Some cars have a serpentine belt or drive belt that powers the water pumps. This belt damage can also be the reason for pump failure. Try replacing the timing belt along with the pump replacement.
- The over-head hose might leak or damage, which causes the pump to leave traces of coolant residue.
- Sometimes you may find the weep hole dripping that indicates the shaft seal has failed. However, a slightly wet weep hole isn’t a significant matter of concern.
- Bad submersible pump can be the result of having a bad seal in the pump system. It causes the coolant flow to leak, leading to a pump failure in the end.
Final Thoughts
You can get stuck in the middle of a road if you drive a car with a failed centrifugal pump. A lousy pump is a leading cause of the overheated engine. If you ignore a terrible pump’s warnings, it can even lead to engine failure as well, making the repair cost more expensive.
Diagnosing a centrifugal pump is best if you think something wrong with it. An early diagnosis prevents your car from having severe damages that can save you a thousand-dollar repairing cost.