Since my wife’s Wira has been changed to using NGV, the engine runs a bit hotter. There are a lot of discussion about making the engine run cooler, ranging from upgrading to a bigger radiator, using TAP device and installing gear cooler. But nothing beats the basic of giving proper attention to your engine coolant. Therefore I have decided to change the engine coolant myself, so I can be in more control of what goes into the radiator compartment.

Why am I being so choosy? Simply because just putting pipe water inside your radiator will just not be enough. There are also additives that you need to add, not just to make your engine run cooler, but also to protect the innards from rusts and other metal particles.

I am going to document down the process that I took to change the coolant. Please remember that not all cars are as easy to DIY as the Wira. And even among Wiras there are a few models, so not all models are built the same. So when you really want to take the plunge, please practise common sense. I shall not be held responsible for any blunder or bodily injury that you sustain trying this out.

My Wira is the 4G15 engine, manufacturing year is 1998. The radiator is actually made up of two fans spread over one huge radiator block. The two red squares below marks the rough location of the two fans.

The red boxes are the rough locations of the two fans. The arrow marks the location of the plug underneath the radiator.

You will need to prepare the materials for your project. The rough volume of the coolant is 4 litres. I bought original Toyota coolant from Toyota Service Centre in Balakong. The Toyota coolant recommends the ratio of 50/50 of coolant and water, so for this project you will need 2 bottles of coolant and 2 bottles of battery water.

Two litres of Toyota Long Life Coolant and two litres of battery water

Why battery water? As I said, I want to be in control of what goes into the radiator. Normal pipe water contains a lot of dissolved minerals, and if mixed inside the radiator might induce the formation of rust or other salt which may clog up the radiator.

Edit : A reader mentioned that it might be a better idea to use RO water instead. I did some checking and true enough, some manufacturers do mix minute quantities of SO₄ (acid). (Thanks Jennifer!)

Size 12 mm screw and wrench

You’re gonna need these wrench set too to dismantle the various screws. And also before you start, I let the car cool itself overnight. Easier to work with coolant that is err ….. cool.

Now comes the toughest part; jacking up the car! I don’t need to show you how it’s done, but just jack it high enough to enable easier access to the radiator plug.

Once you crawl under the car (did I tell you that you WILL get yourself dirty trying this?) locate the plug. It should be just a plastic plug that you can loosen. The plug does not bear any load, so it should loosen pretty easily with just your hand.

Note the plug. Upon loosening the coolant will drip through another vertical hole, just like a pipette that you used to play in your chemistry class

Open the radiator cap above to assist in the the draining of the coolant. You may want to measure the amount of fluid coming out. This will give you a rough idea of how much coolant that you need to fill back later. But I have done this exercise twice to be certain that the 4G15′s radiator coolant volume is 4 litres.

A good idea is to properly clean the innards of your cooling system while changing coolant. This should be easy, just fill up the radiator with normal pipe water and start the engine. Someone did suggest to let the engine run until the radiator fan turns on. Because only then will the liquid start circulating, removing any debris inside. You may also want to use one of those off-the-shelve radiator cleaner for better cleansing.

You can’t have a clean coolant without cleaning the reservoir as well. Cleaning it is easy, just dismantle the reservoir and clean the internals with soap and brush. You’ll be surprised at how much oxidized iron gets build up here.

Remove the screws here to get to the reservoir

After your have thoroughly cleaned the radiator, it’s time to put the pieces back. Tighten back the plug. Pour one bottle of Toyota LLC and one bottle of battery water first through the main radiator cap. Careful, you may spill the mixture out if you pour them too fast. There is a lot of air bubbles still trapped inside there.

Go ahead, start the car! * GULP * yes, despite popular belief, it’s actually okay to start the car with the radiator cap still unlatched, PROVIDED the car is still cold. You will immediately see air bubbles appearing. Go ahead, now you can pour the rest of the mixture in.

Optional : You might want to mix the final 1 litre of battery water and 1 litre of coolant together in a separate container before you pour the rest of them in. This is to guarantee a proper coolant : water ratio. But me being myself, I just simply pour by feel. Too lazy to measure.

You may not be able to finish the entire mixture, but that’s perfectly okay. No need to waste the mixture, you still need to top up the reservoir remember? Just pour the remaining mixture into the reservoir.

There you are done! To make sure everything is running smoothly, take the car for a spin. If you do not notice any more leaks, then congratulations, you have successfully changed the coolant yourself!

Remember my Wira that I have converted to NGV over a year ago? Yes, over a year ago. I keep a record of how much I have traveled and the amount that I refueled so that I can gauge how much I have used and how much I saved compared to using petrol. I wanted to know when I will get a return of investment on the NGV kit that costs me RM 3200. Guess what? It has returned two days ago! From now on, every refueling that we do is an income! How cool is that?

But then again, it is rather unfair to do this kind of calculation. One must remember that since I have converted the Wira to NGV, we made a conscious effort to drive the Wira more often that the Altis. If I have not converted to NGV, all our trips to Sagil would have been on the Altis instead.

Yesterday and today I am off. I need to clear more than 10 days of annual leaves, and they will be burned if I did not finish them by the end of this year. So yesterday I drove all the way to Canon Service Centre at Peremba Square to have my sensor and lens cleaned. I must say, that they really did a great job at it. It was completed in less than the promised 30 minutes. And everything was as good as new! The only thing annoying about the place was that they did not display their latest camera equipments in their showroom. They only have office equipments. Kinda disappointing. But it’s a blessing in disguise; the poison on display would have killed me instantly! =P

Saw this guy with a 40D and a 50D, and a myriads of L lenses there too. He was having his equipment checked, overheard his conversation with the Canon guy that his 580EX II tend to overexpose. Damn, seems this is not an isolated case, some of my friends have their 580EX overexposing every shots too!

I thought I’d tell you what it feels like to be an NGV user, apart from the obvious decrease in monthly expenditure on vehicle fuel. Especially my experience in the many refueling stations that I have patroned over the duration of my NGV usage.

As I mentioned previously, I work in Cyberjaya. Therefore I frequent the Petronas in Cyberjaya the most. Most of the stations are the same, they employ some foreign worker (most likely a Bangladeshi) to do the work. They do most of the manual labour of attaching the hose to your car, turning on and off the valve, and getting the money from us customers.

Since the range of one full tank of refueling is only about 190 km, I almost always have to go refuel at very regular intervals, sometimes once a day if I go to a lot of places. Let me share with you how a normal refueling process go.

A typical NGV pump. Note the pressure indicator at the top

Every station has this dispensing pump that is similar to a petrol pump. The only difference is at the pump head. And one of the most important reading that every NGV user should know is the pressure of the pump. One should get at least 200 bar of pressure to ensure a proper fill. Do please note though, that the tank can get pretty hot when refueling, so make sure you do not put any combustible material along with the tank. Some joker put an acetylene torch tank in the boot and ripped off the entire boot of his car! No joke, this really happened in Kepong!

First thing you do is to locate your nozzle. It is almost always in front of the car, in the bonnet, as my car is.

However some cars can install their nozzle beside their existing fuel line, as with this guy:

Refueling in the same place as the petrol

I have seen some vans, an MPV and a pickup truck refueling at a nozzle located below their front bumper too!

Then comes the tricky part. You take the nozzle, push it into the your car’s nozzle, and turn the valve on the head 180 degrees. This is a very important step, as this locks the head to the nozzle securely. Now on my first refueling experience on my own in UPM, I did not follow this precedure. Nobody taught me anything before! I kept turning the valve over and over. I thought that this is supposed to be a screw type where you need to screw the thing tightly to you car. I turned and turned and turned but it still felt loose! So anyway I figured that it must be already tight. I lost count of where is the correct locking position after so many turns!

A pro at work, attaching the nozzle to the car's inlet valve

So next I pushed the start button. This start button differs from station to station. Some uses the push and pull type, some uses the twist type. So I started the button, but no more than about 15 cents, it got cut off! Ohhh …. I got the locking valve in the unlock position! So paiseh! Seems that the pump itself has its own cut-off system, to avoid idiots like me from pulling a stunt like that.

A properly locked nozzle head. Note the locking valve that you twist to lock and unlock

When the fuel is full, the pump stops. Do the reverse again. Push / pull / twist the button to the stop position, and twist the locking valve. Next comes the other tricky part. You can’t pull on the valve just like that. You will need to pull on the collar of the nozzle before you can unlatch the entire nozzle. Sounds complicated at first, but you’ll get the hang of it with practice. In any case, the friendly Bangladeshi is always there to help!

Lastly pay the guy and go. This makes for another unforgettable experience. Those Banglas deals with a lot of cash everyday. So they try to maximize their income as much as they can. They do this by short-changing their customers by a few cents, which means nothing to NGV users anyway. I have personally encountered one fella in Petronas UPM who insisted that I pumped in an extra 1 Ringgit and refused to give me back my change. After much arguing, he finally succumbed to my demand. How dare! I shall never go to that station anymore.

How do I know if I am almost out of gas? Well, the fuel line for petrol and gas are totally different. Therefore it will need to have a different set of indicators. Pictured here is the fuel pressure indicator:

The gas pressure indicator. Note the red light coming up. That means that I'm low on gas.

On full charge, there are four green lights. As I go along, the lights will turn off one by one, to indicate faltering pressure inside the tank. At the final warning, the red light will come up. I have tried once to totally dry up the tank and let the car sputter to its death! At that situation, I would have covered up to 190 to 200 kms. Not bad at all, when all other forumers in NGV Community that I see only has about 150 to 170 kms!

Another thing you will notice in the picture above is the switch directly above the row of lights. Now it is depressed to the left. It can also be pressed to the right and the centre. The right means use petrol, and centre means both also not use. Why do I need these? Well, since this is a carburetor engine, I will have to follow some steps to start the engine. And all these are done manually using that switch.

First turn the switch to the right, the petrol. Turn on the engine like you normally would. You may wait for a few minutes to let the engine warm up, but that is entirely optional. For myself, I quickly move on to the next step, switch to the centre. This cuts off the petrol supply. The engine does not die so soon. There are some left over petrol in the carburetor compartment that needs to be properly burned off before you can start the gas. Else you will encounter some serious knocking.

Wait for a few seconds, the car will slowing start to die. Just as the engine is about to choke, turn on the gas. The engine will whir back to life again, but you still have to press the accelerator a little. The mixture of unburned petrol and gas will induce a second stage of knocking, this time more serious. Keep the accelerator depressed again for a few seconds to burn off this left-over petrol. When the final bits of petrol is gone, the engine will return to normal idling speed again. You are now ready to take on the road!

That sounded like a lot of work. And it fact it does. But the good thing is that if you are only planning to switch off your engine for less than an hour, you do not really need to repeat the steps again. Just leave the switch to NGV and you can immediately start the engine normally.

So far I have saved some RM400 since I last installed this thing. And I do expect that my initial investment of RM3200 will pay for itself in a year or less, even with the lowered petrol price after tonight. My initial fear of going outstation is now known as a baseless allegation. I have now already went back to Sagil TWICE using this car! Yes, the range is only about 200 km, but with proper planning, I could actually reach there and back using NGV alone! There are a lot of refueling station down south, outside of Klang Valley. There are at least 3 in Seremban / Senawang area, and 3 in Melaka. So I normally make a stop-over in Ayer Keroh to refuel before continuing my journey to Sagil. I can still go to Tangkak from Sagil a few times after that before I need to go to Ayer Keroh to refuel again. The savings is just mind-blowing! About only RM 15 worth of fuel for the entire journey! That’s less than the price of a return ticket using express bus! That’s a cool RM0.05 per km! Unbelievable!

Now you know why I can save a lot of moolah’s nowadays!

With the rising fuel prices and the never-ending commitments that I need to shoulder, it is only natural that I seek to increase my income and lower my expenditures. Having scrutinized my monthly budget, I have come to realize that the biggest money outflow goes to petrol. And between the two cars (Wira 1.5 GL (auto) 1998 and Altis 1.8G 2002), the Wira is the most fuel inefficient.

Having identified the cause is not useful if no action is taken. While all the other people talk about ways to reduce fuel consumption (turn off air-cond, drive at 80 km/h max, fuel additive), nothing is as drastic as what I did for the Wira yesterday. While others only talk, I choose to walk! Go gas!

It was not really an overnight decision, it has been hovering my mind since the last fuel increase in June. Having done a lot of research online and through words from the taxi drivers I have come to chat with, I went ahead with the decision to convert it to NGV. If the price of fuel is sustained at RM2.70 per litre, I should be able to recover the cost of conversion in a year or less.

The Wira is a 4G15 engine, normally aspirated carburetor with 4 cylinder. The cheapest of all conversions compared to other modern injection engines. Here’s how the engine look like after the conversion:

The only clue to its NGV property is the refueling nozzle in the engine bay

There is also this gas release valve that pumps gas into the carburetor

I chose the 70 litre tank to store more gas, lesser stop-overs. The last mileage I got was over 150 km, but I suspect that I can still go further. I’ll update this post again when I have more conclusive statistics. The best mileage that I can squeeze out of this tank is an impressive 210 km, but I suspect that I can still go further using a better NGV station (the best so far is at Senawang, the one with only one nozzle.)

How does driving an NGV car feel like? Sluggish. Yes, as all other NGV drivers will be able to testify, performance will definitely be affected to a certain extent. More so for carburetor engines I hear. And also you must understand that there is this HUGE cylinder tank at the boot that weight at least 70 kgs. When negotiating a corner yesterday, the car swayed so much at the back. Good, induced oversteer! Here’s how it looks like at the boot area:

Starting the car in itself requires some re-learning. In the cold morning, it is almost impossible to start the car with gas alone. So what you should do is to start in petrol, warm up the car for a bit, then cut off the petrol. This will burn off all petrol that is left in the carburetor and the engine. When the engine is about to die, immediately switch to gas and hope that the gas won’t die on you! Sounds complicated? In reality it is. I have not yet mastered the timing to switch yet and I almost always end up killing the engine instead.

There is also the problem of refueling stations. Not much of a problem actually. Where I stay, the nearest stations are in Serdang, UPM, Cyberjaya, Putrajaya, Puchong and Subang. I work in Cyberjaya, so no issues for me to refuel after work. There is also one opening soon in Bangi, and get this, TWO right in front of my house! All the more reasons why I should go NGV already!

My refueling experience in UPM

Somebody did mention on a forum that the engine will be hotter compared to a petrol head. My experience with the car does not show this anomaly. But my car’s coolant system has always been very effective (touch wood). The meter is always lesser than half-way on the temperature readout. Either the meter is broken, or the car has been running coolly all these while.

So it looks like the Wira will once again find its role useful again after the arrival of the Altis. Of course, being an NGV, this will definitely limit the car to areas in and around Klang Valley. Going back to Sagil will be out of the question. (Refer to update below) However for trip to KL, this car will be most welcomed. Will snap some pictures  soon with pictures to show you guys.

Update 7th April 2009: I have been able to make frequent trips to Sagil using NGV alone, and also make that trip to Muar as well! Just make one stop-over at Melaka (Jalan Ayer Keroh) and I’m good to go! I just came back from a marathon return trip to Sagil yesterday evening and day before yesterday! Yes, two return trips in 2 days! Imagine how much I save nowadays!