From what I have read cars run from 190 to 220 plus with a stock stat. With the 160 they run from 178 to 210. Are you saying that the the engine is machined with tolerances so tight that running 12 degrees cooler is going to cause increased wear and tear? In most cases the the temps overlap in the 190's. Doesn't sound like a convincing arguement to me. Maybe you can go ahead and calculate how much difference there are in the components fexpansion or contraction for a 10 degree difference for us and then compare that to the machining tolerances that GM designs to.

 

Hello,

Engine wear is doubled when you go from 185 degree thermostat to 160
degrees (C6 it's 190). I don't make this stuff up, the wear charts etc.
are all out there on the internet for the reading. I did a quick search and found the engine wear charts in 30 seconds on the Corvette Action Center.

From the above response it appears that some of us don't fully grasp how a cooling system works.
You could have a 120 degree thermostat and fans set to run all the time and a stock 190 degree thermostat and on a 120 degree day in the Arizona desert the car will run the same temperature. Why you ask? Because the cars cooling system has reached it's maximum ability to get rid of heat. This does not happen all at once, but rather the cooling system is slowly overwhelmed and that is why you see your car run warmer than 160 degrees on hot days.

190 degrees subtract 160 degrees equals 30 degrees, not 10 degrees as stated above, your using information from a cooling system that is slowly being overwhelmed on a hot day.

Hope this helps,
Douglas in Green Bay

 

The coefficient of thermal expansion of 12E-6in/in/degree F. So even for a 30 degree delta you are talking a thousandth of an inch (1mil) I don't think machining tolerances are that good. The wear charts and articles you refer to are pretty clear that there is increased wear below 160. The point here is that even with a 160 stat the engines run at 178 and up. The graph your are referring to plots engine temp on the x axis not tstat rating. I had one in my 2006 C6 ad it ran consistently between 187 and 193, not below 170, smack in the good zone on the chart. The engines warm up fast, besides even with a stock 187 stat you still have to warm up through the colder engine temps where the wear occurrs anyway. I am not saying your wrong, just saying that there isn't really much more wear running your car between 187 and 193 than 196 and 210.

 

So basically what you're saying is...that as our cars are warming up, and this is every single time we drive mind you, we are wearing our motors twice as much as the coolant temps pass over the 160 degree mark as we are when the temps settle at 190 or so?
Not to state the obvious or anything but every one of our cars do see 160 (or 140, or 120) as they warm up.
And if 185 is so much better for overall wear than 160 then is it safe to assume that 240 is SUBSTANTIALLY better than 190?
Plug wires, hoses, seals etc are generally not huge fans of excessive/prolonged heat exposure...again not to state the obvious or anything.

It should also be noted that the coolant (or even oil) temp readout on the DIC isn't necessarily an exact science either. It's merely a sensor placed at some point in the system but it might not be 100% accurate for every piece/every corner of that motor, some areas might be hotter, some might be cooler.

 

Again, not really. You use as much power as your right foot dictates. Even though there's more power available with cool dense air if you drive the same (meaning you will use a little less throttle) you will get the same MPG.

Don't get me started with the winter mixture gasoline. It just pisses me off.

 

some crazy theories going on here.....my water temps are kept cooler going down the road and at idle with a 160 stat Cartek fan module and EWP, but even with all that extra to keep the engine compartment heat down for parts to last longer, get excellent 1/4 mile times, my oil temps remain the same, why does this happen, because the heat is made from the cylinders firing, the heat radiates out, heat soak!!!, so in summing up, if you have the manual z51 z06 or added an oil cooler you are damaging your motor

 

Gee. somebody should tell the engineers at GM about the miracles surrounding the 160 thermostat!!!

 

Douglas in Green Bay

 

Yeah, because GM/Chevrolet uses ONLY the best performance parts available on their vehicles, right? Perhaps someone should tell Kooks, LG, ARH that they no longer need to sell headers for these cars because some guys on the Corvette Forum proclaimed the factory manifolds as perfect.
A 160 degree thermostat might have it's minor flaws (and benefits) just as the stock thermostat does, just because the factory uses a part DOES NOT mean that it's absolutely and irrefutably right for every application, it's just basic common sense really. This also applies to tires, exhausts, air intake systems, shocks, seats, stereos etc. etc.

 

I believe this is one of the most discussed topics on the forum. First, the 192 degree thermostat was installed at the factory for a reason. I dropped the trigger temp on my fans and my car runs 198 - 205 all the time. Every tuner that I've talked to discouraged me from lower the thermostats temp. Normally, you need to advance your timing a little bit to compensate.

I have a friend with a 2007 couple that installed a 160 thermostat. On a southern California winter night with ambient air temps in the low 50's, his engine temperature was 155. (I presume the thermostat was open a bit). At that engine temp, not all parts have expanded to engineered specs, and you can expect something to experience excessive wear and be damaged.

 

Hey Dennis, what's EWP?

 

 

Running at that constant temp for a prolonged period of time is not a good thing.
But most of us here that are fans (no pun intended ) of the 160 degree t-stat are not running that cold on a regular basis, something else must be going awry in your friend's set up.





Electric Water Pump.

 

First the stock tstat is 187 not 192. Second I used a 160 on my 2006 C6 coupe and it ran constantly between 187 and 193 summer and winter in Santa Barbara CA. So your friend must have a bad tstat, did he check it before he installed it to see if it actually opened at 160 or lower?

What tuners are you referring to? All the tuners I have spoken with use the lower temp tstat including Chuck COW among others. Properly installed the car will run at 185 to 195 with a correctly funtioning 160 tstat.

 

GM uses the high temp thermostat for emissions reasons, period. Higher temps reduce NOx emissions.

 

[QUOTE=LS1LT1;1571476554]So basically what you're saying is...that as our cars are warming up, and this is every single time we drive mind you, we are wearing our motors twice as much as the coolant temps pass over the 160 degree mark as we are when the temps settle at 190 or so?
Not to state the obvious or anything but every one of our cars do see 160 (or 140, or 120) as they warm up.
And if 185 is so much better for overall wear than 160 then is it safe to assume that 240 is SUBSTANTIALLY better than 190?
Plug wires, hoses, seals etc are generally not huge fans of excessive/prolonged heat exposure...again not to state the obvious or anything.

Hello again,

Now you are catching on, yes 90% of engine wear happens when the engine is warming up to the designed temperatures and tolerances that the engineers calculated.

The engineers decided that 190 degrees was the sweet spot that they would design the tolerances of the motor around. Your right, they could have designed the engine tolerances to run a 160, 180, 200 degree or 210 degree thermostat, but they didn't.

To address some of the other comments: Your right, Corvette does not come with all the best parts for performance, they had to keep the price low so average people could afford the car. So yes you can have nice gains utilizing other parts to make the car perform better.

My ultimate question is do you thing GM didn't consider a 160 degree thermostat for $8.00??

And yes, it is related to emmissions as well as overall engine longevity, you need nice hot cats to burn up the unburned fuel.

Hope this helps,
Douglas in Green Bay

 

[QUOTE=KB9GKC;1571480600]
The difference in thermal expansion for the largest parts in the motor is about a mil for a 30 delta T between a 160 and a stock 187, which at operating temp is about 10 degrees so it is really less than 1/2 a mil. You think GM designs the tolerances to better than a mil? The chart you are referring to on corvette action center clearly shows that engine operating temps between 170 and 200 are ideal, so in terms of premature wear it doesn't matter.

 

Great post

 

[QUOTE=KB9GKC;1571480600]i guess we will never change your mind on this because you read it somewhere, i had a very smart teacher who use to drum it in my head, never believe anything you read and only half of what you see, i set my car up to be the fastest at what it is, that's water temps vs oil temps, if you are talking wear your talking friction, friction slows a motor down, how is it my car is the fastest bolt/on by a long shot with all that wear

 

Well, they do design their cars with a committee of engineers and millions in R&D money, whereas Joe Tuner at the forum's favorite tuning shop...

But FWIW I do have a 160 tstat, headers, and an intake!