For the past month my car has been smoking on startup and I was having no luck figuring it out. I did figure out that it was burning coolant. I started to fear the worst. The thing was, I had no coolant in the oil and no bubbling of the coolant in the radiator. I was loosing some coolant though.

I borrowed a friend’s coolant pressure tester a couple of weeks ago to see if I could figure out the problem. I fount a small leak at one of the hose clamps for the lower radiator hose. That turned out to be my cause of coolant loss. Once I figured that out, I wasn’t loosing any coolant pressure. I was stumped.

Yesterday I was thinking maybe I should check other possibilities. The only other thing that has coolant in it is the subzero start assist. Last night I disconnected the start assist and started the car. The car smoked like crazy but I figured it could possibly just be residual coolant in the motor. I let the car run and got the air out of the coolant. I took it for a drive to finish burning off the coolant.

This morning I started the car and it didn’t smoke at all. The car is fixed. All I can figure is the sensor was shorting out causing the pump to go on every time I started the car.