Greetings fellow LOSTers. I thought I'd throw this out to the group to see if we can get some idea of why my '06 Liberty suddenly decides to overheat.
Here's the whole sad story (insert wavy "going back in time" graphic here)...
My wife and I take our Liberty out to JeepSkool in NE Ohio once a month and have a blast out there (along with fellow LOSTers Donkeykong and House34). In April, we had an issue when we found ourselves on a trail that we probably had no business being on, and ended up getting kinda stuck (well, Donkeykong did, anyway
). We were behind him, and in the process of trying to strap him out (in reverse), we overheated to the point that the coolant was boiling in the reservoir. After running the heater to the point of melting the dashboard air vents (ok, 3 out of 4 of them), letting it cool down and topping the reservoir off, we daisychained the 3 Libbies together and dragged Donkeykong (and his skidplate and the giant Sequoia trunk that he somehow managed to get wedged into his lower control arm) out of the mud and back onto terra firma. Later that day, on a fairly tame trail, we again watched the temp needle spike to the right. We just shut it down, let it cool on its own and called it a day. The radiator fan WAS running at this point, but we did have quite a bit of mud blasted into the radiator and figured that was part of the problem.
Since this is also my daily driver, I was concerned, but driving to work for the next 4 weeks caused no issues whatsoever. Then the first weekend in May arrives, and we head out to JeepSkool again, and again we have temperature issues. When in 4LO, it runs hot. We stopped, let it cool down, and had one of the staff members take a look at it. The fan was running, and would run pretty much like a fan ought to run. Nothing seemed to be impeding its progress, and all the fuses were good. We switched out the cooling fan relay box with the heater fan box, since they both had the same number on them. This made it happier, for a while anyway. Later that week I took our Libby to my local garage and had them run it through the paces, but they could not reproduce the problem. I had them replace the cooling fan relay with a new one anyway. (We've yet to have the local dealership take a whack at it yet.)
This past weekend, we once again head out to JeepSkool and did pretty well with it, keeping a wary eye on the temp gauge. Sure enough, in 4LO on a rocky trail that wasnt steep in any way, the needle headed up to "H". The fan kicked on, dropping the gauge to about 3/4. We got off the trail (causing the temp to rise again), heard the coolant boiling in the reservoir again, and pretty much spent the rest of the day either on trails that you could take a Yugo on, or watching Donkeykong do things with a Liberty that you didn't think a Liberty could do (ask him about grinding the sandstone down with his skid plate until he could get over it.)
Our assumption now is that the thermostat is either kaput or soon to be kaput. The fan turns fine when it runs, the radiator neither leaks nor is it clogged with mud, the hoses are good (visually, from the outside anyway), the relay is brand new, there are no puddles of coolant to be found anywhere, we're not running the AC, nor am I chugging thick clouds of white smoke like a WW2 destroyer laying down a smokescreen. It just doesnt seem that the fan knows when it's supposed to go "whirrrrrr...."
We gotta get this dealt with by the 4th of July weekend, as that's the next JeepSkool, and we're looking to add rails and a lift this summer and take it out to Colorado again this fall (Black Bear Pass or Bust!)...but not if we're worried about spiking the gauge in 4LO somewhere out in the sticks.
Thoughts?
Suggestions?
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