How cold does it have to get for the water to freeze ?
How cold does it have to get for the water to freeze ?
32º
Is this a trick question? I'd say if it's any colder than 32F for more than a few hours you'll run the risk of it freezing assuming you're starting with a cold engine.
If it's only a degree or two below 32F it might take a day to start freezing (assuming you're not running the engine).
This also assumes that the ambient temp wasn't hovering right around 32F for a couple days before dropping below that.
All my cars have pretty much pure anti-freeze.
Some of it depends on how much heat capacity everything has. We've left water only in our lemons cars at night when the ambient temp was in the mid 20's with no issues, but we ran them for a bit before going to bed to get them up to temp to keep the heat in them a bit, all you need to do is keep the smallest and most exposed water lines above 30 or so. Another option is to put a drop light with an incandescent bulb under the hood for the night, or a block heater.
It was the block was 27 this morning. I have to put water in it tomorrow. For testing.
32 Fahrenheit, 0 Celsius, 273.15 Kelvin. Antifreeze is cheap at walmart.
I'll second the drop light and incandescent bulb. You can also pick up a little thermostat that cuts on at 34.
Let me play with pressure, electricity, or a few other things, and I can change the freezing point of water all over the place.
I have seen a SBC pop it's "freeze plugs" at not much below freezing with just water in the cooling
just add some salt, that should help out with freezing issues 
N Sperlo wrote: All my cars have pretty much pure anti-freeze.
Bad idea.
Pure ethylene glycol freezes at approximately the same temperature as water.
50/50 mix lowers the freezing temperature to about -35* F
Optimum mix is around 60/40 anti-freeze to water. That gets you down toward -40.
put in a mix that's as cold as you expect the temps to be... and even if you underestimate the coldness, a slightly weak mix will just turn to slush, which doesn't hurt anything..
I figured I would run water in the challenge car just in case something failed.
There are more problems with straight water than freezing, mainly corrosion. Antifreeze has lots of corrosion inhibitors in it, that's why you're supposed to change it every so often, to get fresh corrosion inhibitors in there. If you're running water in a a race car you store it completely drained, block drain plugs pulled and everything. Water wetter claims to help with this, though I've never heard good things unless the system was stored dry.
If the rules let you run antifreeze, do.
We run only water at our local track. I have never seen any ill effects. Block gets a little rusty, but no big deal.
most sanctioning bodies don't allow anti-freeze because of how super slippery it is .. if you pop a hose on track and dump water .. no big deal .. if it's anti-freeze … your fellow competitors aren't going to be very happy with you 
Kenny_McCormic wrote: There are more problems with straight water than freezing, mainly corrosion.
Pure distilled water will not cause corrosion. It also has better thermal properties as far as being a heat transfer medium.
wbjones wrote: most sanctioning bodies don't allow anti-freeze because of how super slippery it is .. if you pop a hose on track and dump water .. no big deal .. if it's anti-freeze … your fellow competitors aren't going to be very happy with you
Agreed. Drag strips have to burn antifreeze off the track, not just mop it up. It takes forever--last time I was at the track, a guy popped a freeze plug for some reason and didn't notice. It took over 2 hours to clean.
And on that note, I'll go drain the cooling system in the race car 'afore I forget.
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