Life Hack... MY CAR!!!

The second in a series of at least two Life Hacks, here's another one!!!

This one may just fix your car. I sometimes tell people, just like the human body, one of the keys to keeping your car alive is to keep the insides wet!!! If you've got an oil leak, better put more in at a corresponding rate or do something to stem the flow. Coolant can be even trickier, as you don't want to be opening a hot cooling system, nor be putting cold coolant into an overheating engine. Especially with the aluminum block and head engines these days, overheating can rapidly destroy an engine. Lack of a good seal in the cooling system will cause a pressure loss, which in turn lowers the boiling point, further exacerbating the problem. Whenever I'm looking through used car ads and come across one where they list several new cooling system components recently installed, that's an automatic pass.

So, if there's a small leak in your cooling system, like a pinhole leak in a radiator or heater core, here's a simple fix that has worked for me on several occasions.

Add a tablespoon or so of black pepper to your cooling system (while it's cold, of course) next time you're adding coolant!!! It doesn't seem like it would do anything, and I can't remember where I heard it from at first, but it works more often than not!!! Of course, it won't fix a leaking seal on a water pump or a bullet hole from a .45 through your radiator, but for a pinhole leak, it'll do. The theory is that the pepper granules will lodge in the hole, and when heated and exposed to air, will swell up and seal the hole.