A broken hose or belt can stop you in your tracks

A problem with either of these could stop you in your tracks. If a hose breaks or cracks, antifreeze/coolant will exit the cooling system. In rather short order, your car will overheat. Then, you’ll have a choice of pulling over to the side of the road or ruining your engine.

On the other hand, if the belt that drives your alternator, power steering pump and water pump breaks, you’ll also want to find a place to pull over soon, or even an auto repair shop if you can get there without driving too far.

The first thing you’ll notice, if the belt breaks (usually a serpentine belt), is that the steering wheel is harder to turn. As soon as the power-steering pump stops pumping, the steering assistance it offers ceases.

The next thing you’re liable to notice, if you watch your lights and gauges, is that the alternator gauge has dropped to about zero. If it’s at night, soon you may notice the lights dimming. As soon as the belt stopped turning the alternator, it stopped producing electricity. Your car will continue to run just about as long as it takes to drain any juice out of the battery.

Since the serpentine belt also drives the water pump, when it stops turning, the antifreeze/coolant will stop moving through the engine. That movement is essential to cooling the engine while it operates. The antifreeze/coolant moves through the engine where, as it is colder than its surroundings, it draws heat out of the metal parts.

Then the coolant is moved out of the engine, through those hoses mentioned above, and into the radiator. A fan pulls air through the radiator. That air is cooler than the antifreeze/coolant and the same process of heat transfer (this is a convection process we learned about in school) occurs. This time, the air draws the heat out of the coolant so it is cool again and ready for another heat-collecting run through the engine.

When the water pump stops pumping, the water stops moving and heat starts building. If it builds too high, the heat can damage the engine. Fortunately, when you break a serpentine belt, the battery will probably run dry before the heat damages the engine but that’s not guaranteed.

In either case, if you simply see the temperature of the engine rising on your gauge, and possibly steam rising out around the hood, or if you see the temperature rising and the alternator dropping, while the steering grows heavy and sluggish, you’ll want to find a place to pull over and shut off the car.

If you wait too long, the car will shut off all by itself. This means the battery is now empty, if the serpentine belt broke, or the engine has seized from the heat, if it was a hose. Hopefully, if the engine does stop, the problem was a serpentine belt.

If you’re close to an auto repair shop, you may drive that far. But, watch the temperature gauge closely. You don’t want to push it too far considering the cost of replacing an engine.

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