A rule of thumb when reading a wiki article - any [citation needed] tags should raise a red flag.

If the lactic acid gets to the point of being "very corrosive" (remember, lactic acid is the stuff found in milk), your locomotive's antifreeze has probably been "exposed to" so much "air and heat" that you probably have bigger problems to deal with.

--
Will

Which is the swan song of (how do you put it? ah yes) the "Firmly entrenched".

Your previous postings seem to be a continuous litany of hand-wringing. How can ethylene glycol be that toxic if it's allowed in cars? Oh, is the safe stuff compatible with the good stuff? Oh what about the pink stuff, I've heard all bad about that. Etc. It seems pretty clear that you are definitely in the "resistant to change" category.

I appreciate you doing research, but no offense, be careful. Proper science really requires impartiality. The temptation is to tilt your research toward supporting your preconceived notion, and then stop researching. It's easy to fall to that. And as such, research done by biased researchers is often viewed as suspect.

All those things on the Wikipedia page -- well, to begin with it's Wikipedia, and that has a number of well known problems. But even so, for instance you say propylene glycol can turn acidic and have growths... but that's only a fair concern if the other stuff is immune to problems of equal magnitude. You didn't research that. Instead you fell prey to "it must be the good stuff, everyone uses it." Yeah, everyone uses Windows, too.

I've always understood that ethylene glycol should be changed annually, under threat of all sorts of problems if you don't. Like me, you probably DON'T change it annually, and you've gotten away with it. Well -- who's to say you can't "get away with" not changing the other stuff annually?

Another issue is causality. "Correlation is not causality". My own car, I put propylene glycol in it 4 years ago, and now the thermostat is stuck open. Is that BECAUSE of the propylene glycol? Or because the thermostat is 15 years old? See the problem. GM requires the pink stuff not arbitrarily; it was because they changed several engine components to be incompatible with the green stuff. Those other components reported high failure rates. Is that because of the pink stuff? Or because the components were of a new design that had OTHER problems? Or because people wrongly used the green stuff?

We have it worse on these old engines. We won't know if it's propylene glycol, biodiesel, or "diesel Classic" that did it in, or would have happened in any case. There are infinite opportunities to point the finger in any desired direction.


Saw that coming :-)

I simply did not see any dramatic increase in performance or cost savings from propylene glycol to convince me to change. I did not have any preconceived ideas, I wanted to learn what was the best coolant to use. And during this thread I have learned a lot. Now if PG was as easily available and as economical as EG then perhaps I would consider it, but the fact is that is is not as readily available and is more expensive, and provides nothing in return for those increased costs.

I have worked on many locomotives over the years from Alcos to GE to EMD and I found use the pink stuff and do regular oil samples to make sure there is no dilution going on. I have never had a problem. I would rather do that then roll the dice with an malfunctioning GURU or Ogonz valve.

Fair enough.

I believe there is no dramatic difference in performance. I.E. the performance difference is negligible enough not to care which one is better. Propylene glycol will tend to cost more to purchase.

The dramatic cost savings will (or won't) be in disposal and/or cleanup of spills. It will really depend on what the state or local hazmat inspector will require, in the future, when disposal or cleanup occurs.

I personally thought CO2 blasting was completely ridiculous, until someone pointed out that the media "evaporating" means vastly fewer barrels of spent media to send off to hazmat disposal.