Hi All,
Just wanted to share my story in hopes of helping others.
I have a 2001 Ram 1500 Pick Up, 192k.
My heater core went a few weeks ago. I noticed the antifreeze leaking on the floor. At this time i got in my truck one rainy morning with a hot cup of coffee and the windows started fogging. I put the defrost on and smelled the antifreeze. It made the windows worse. It was like a film of oil all over the windshield. I kept wiping it with a rag as I was Driving. Couldn't see a thing. Anyway I came to this forum for help and got it, thanks to all of you. I managed to change the heater core. It wasn't fun. Took about 5 hours. Well, after that, still had no heat, and heat selector switch wasn't working. I was puzzled. So I changed the T-Stat. You will see the photo of how bad that was. That still didn't solve the problem. So I read about possible air in the system not allowing for circulation to the core. Didn't work either. Long story short, changed the water pump. I will try and upload a photo of that. It was shot. Had no blades on impeller. Also found small vacuum hose going through firewall by ac compressor had been damaged. Spliced it back together and everything is working perfect now. If anyone has any questions in regards to either please ask. Thank you all.

 

Sounds like you need to flush the block and radiator as well. There's a lot of junk in your truck's cooling system.

 

I did flush the block and the radiator. Lots of crap came out.

 

That looks pretty ugly......I would probably drive a while and flush again. Just to get as much crap out as possible.

 

this is a question - why would a water pump have no blades on the impeller?
did they erode away?
(isn't the impeller aluminum...)

can you post a pic of your water pump? i'd like to see that.

 

this is another question.
what is this material buildup on the t-stat?
is it a mineral deposit from tap/well water?
and if so, would it be clogging up the radiator as well.

awesome pictures. cut/pasted directly into the thread for you..

 

That's vile. I would be flushing that system once a week for about a month, until things came out crystal clean, at least twice.

 

I'm having a hard time uploading the photo of the water pump. I'm sorry, I'm new at this. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
As for the questions, don't know what the impeller was made out of but it looks like it just rotted away. Don't know what all the crap is, but it looks like it could be some kind of mineral deposit. It doesn't appear to be clogging the radiator at this time. A lot of it came out when I did the flush. I would love to get the pump photo up for everyone to see.

 

Upload your pics to someplace like photobucket, then just use Image tags to post the pics.

 

I'm considering installing a filter on my cooling system.