Head gasket gone?

[kooky_guy]

Well it overheated properly this morning so had to call the AA. They reckoned the water pump has gone. Interesting. Apparently all the gas is due to the water boiling locally where it's not being circulated.

Does that sound about right? The temp was fine until I got to a hill when it quickly climbed to critical and the low coolant alarm went off.

[stoaby]

Faulty of worn waterpumps are a common thing on the 2lt Diesel engine.

[mikeybutch]

That does seem like a pump that has failed in stages.

[Crasher]

Faulty water pump impellers WERE an issue but in the last few years this has died right down to almost nothing.

[kooky_guy]

Thanks all,

Car is at the garage but they can't look at it until next week. Fingers crossed for the water pump, although that's not a cheap repair either. I'm guessing it wasn't replaced when the cam belt was done just before I bought it. Cheapskates.

Hopefully it will fix my heater too!

[kooky_guy]

Got the car back last night - the water pump was dead, he showed it to me and the poxy plastic impeller had cracked all the way across making it pretty much just drop off the shaft of the pump.

Unfortunately my heater still isn't working. He seems to think there isn't enough flow through the heater but is baffled as to why as the matrix doesn't appear to have any restrictions when he flushed it. Does the heater usually have a fairly poor flow through it? I'm wondering if it's just scaled up and can't actually transfer what little heat there is to the air going through it...

Hard to see how there can't be full flow through the matrix as it's on the primary cooling circuit isn't it? Is there any way the coolant flow could be bypassing the matrix? I can't seem to find any definitive flow diagrams and the pipework is hard to follow.

[mikeybutch]

I think its possible for the matrix to fail even though theres a flow through the system.