This is equivalent to choosing to permanently remove a circuit breaker from
your house that keeps triggering. Either it's triggering because of a
dangerous load (which makes it a safety device and dangerous to simply
remove), or it's triggering because it's faulty. Either you want to fix
the load, or you want to replace it with a working circuit breaker. But
NEVER choose to take the circuit breaker out of the loop.
The thermostat is similar - it helps your engine get warm and keeps it from
overheating. So it does a little more than a circuit breaker, but it's
still a safety device. Remove it, and there's nothing left to protect your
engine from temperature problems.
I've replaced a few thermostats on vehicles; usually they would fail and
the car would in turn fail to get warm. This just happened with my Saab
this winter. I could drive it for 2 hours on the highway and it would
never get up to normal temp (never budge out of the cold). Dead
thermostat. New thermostat, runs great. Same thing happened with my van
the winter before.
Now my MG has the opposite problem - running way too high. Could be a
flaky thermostat that won't protect. I'm going to replace the stat along
with doing a few other things. This is a more dangerous problem. But
consider that a thermostat that might be stuck such that the car gets too
hot would be identical to just not having a thermostat at all.
Also, consider if you removed the thermostat from the wall in your
house. Your furnace would run all the time and you'd roast. They
obviously don't function identically as a car stat, but close enough for
the idea. Your engine could roast too. It may be only temperate outside,
but it gets a lot hotter than that inside your engine. No thermostat and
you might soon have no engine. Not recommended.
- Tab
At 02:47 PM 4/19/00 +0000, eric@erickson.on.net wrote:
>As a NEW topic :-)
>
>Can I canvass the range of opinions on running with no thermostat at all?
>
>The temperature where I am rarely gets *really* cold (well, certainly no
>ice or
>snow) but what is the danger of the engine running *too* cold for *too*
>long? in
>a temperate climate region?
>
>Sure I may need to run the choke for a bit longer... or maybe not?
>
>Is there any danger of the water temp. guage not telling me what it should
>(the
>water temperature is the water temperature is the water temperature, isn't
>it)?
>
>In these generally warm to hot climates I get sick of the car running hot, so
>having the temperature down a bit certainly doesn't make me nervous.
>
>There you go... and I didn't even put the words "stupid question" in the
>subject
>line :-)
>
>
>Eric
>'68MGB MkII
>
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