SO, 1998 24Valve,

it's about 20 degrees. Winter just arrived.
I drove my truck about 30 miles and it barely warmed up. The needle sat still, but I could tell it was somewhat warm due to the heater not being cold.

Is this normal?????? I don't recall it being that way last winter. I know it would never warm up on short trips...But I could swear that anything over about 20 miles and the engine would come up to temperature.

Do I have a faulty thermostadt??? Or do I just need to put one of those blanket things on the radiator like the big rigs have.???? I've had this an awful long time and I don't recall ever having gone 30 miles without having it warm up at least so the needle starts moving? (If I recall it usually took about 15 minutes...I also always have the block heater plugged in).

I thought I read a couple years back on this forum that my truck needed to run at 187 degrees or more in order to run properly. This is obviously not the case here...at least on the surface.

Ok,
If anybody had this problem, please advise. I had read that in the past some of the thermostadts were awfully slow. But this seems like something more.

later,
Clayton in Salt lake

 

If you drove 30 miles and it didn't warm up then the thermostate is bad. These are slow to warm up, but 6 to 8 miles should be sufficient to get warm.

 

Was it all on the highway? When it gets real cold out my truck won't get up to temp on the highway, hell it will even drop in temp once I get on the highway! But it usually comes up past 140 (the lowest readout on the factory gauge) regardless, sits ~160. In town driving with less air flow it will get right up to temp though.

Even if it is the thermostat you will still want to get some sort of grill cover to keep the heat in the engine bay. I've been meaning to get one myself but the one I want is discontinued and the others just aren't to my liking .

 

I changed the thermostat (checker auto...I think it was about 20 bucks).
It now comes up to temp.very quickly..6 or 8 miles,...faster than the old one (when it was working properly) for sure. But once it's up to temp...it acts the same as the old one. It is running at 190 degrees give or take, and it's about 28 degrees outside right now.

I kind of have a problem with the thermostats, though. In the old days (I'm an old farmer type) , didn't most of them have a small relief hole in them somewhere just so a little bit of of fluid was always trickling by??????? Now that mine is working again, I'm sure it's going to pee some fluid out the drain **** (at the bottom of the radiator on the drivers side in a very hard place to get to) every once in a while like it used to. I was half tempted to take it back out and drill a 1/32 hole just for pressure relief once I shut it off.

Anybody got any ideas on that one now that I'm thinking about it?

THANK YOU,
I'm not in burbank, CA anymore, but I haven't changed my signature to Salt lake yet.

 

Yeah I've noticed that with a lot of new thermostats actually, they've done away with that hole for whatever reason. It's mostly in reproduction units though, OEM stuff typically has it. I've seen quite a few people who just drill a hole in it and haven't heard of any problems to date, although I haven't heard of any adverse affects from not doing anything about it either.

 

I believe that hole in the thermostat is actually for air to escape from the block passages when refilling the cooling system.