Manami

My husband put engine coolant but he forgot adding water.
He started driving and smoke came out of the hood.
It smelled really bad and it made us have headache.
Did it do any damage to his car? Is the smoke harmful to breathe in??

SKAR

Yes dont breathe it in, your going to want to drain it and add the correct mixture, if its pure antifreeze it will gel up.

Manami

thank you for the response.
unfortunately, he doesn't know how much coolant he added.
he needed two bottles, and he didn't pay attention to the second bottle, which wasn't premixed. now he thinks coolant is leaking because of the smoke. spend spend spend..

SKAR

He might of just dumped some into the engine bay

after reading your posts so far, could both you and your husband never open the hood of your car yourselves but leave it to someone who has half an idea what they are doing.

Manami

maybe... so should we still add water? and we can't really afford to pay for some car people. we are poor.

CotyStiles

Haha. Alright, I'm the husband.

So what happened is I was running a pure water cooling system--with a wetting agent (royal purple).
We live in Hawaii so it's really no problem...

Bad part is, when the heater core broke and started evaporating away the water, we couldn't smell the cooling water leaking out.

So when I checked this morning, I was low on coolant, and added straight anti-freeze, expecting to only add a quart or so...
1 gallon later, the reservoir is full.
Anyway, I bypassed the heater core since, again, living in Hawaii it's unnecessary.

Problem solved.