At 11:03 PM 2/21/2000 , - Lauren Pelzer wrote:
>Anyway - it is in the shop now.   Not my regular shop, but these guys have
>worked on the van before.   They called today and told me that it was going
>to take longer than expected because (and here is my concern) they need to
>take out the seats and pull back the carpeting to get to where the steam is
>coming in.

No doubt the steam is coming from your rear heater which is under the rear
seat.  If it suddenly got a big leak it will have dumped bunches of coolant
all over the place.  I'm assuming something happened like a hose split or
came off -- otherwise I'd expect that you'd have smelled/seen coolant days
before it emptied the system.

Having these heaters leak is common (look at the archives for the last
week, for example) but I haven't heard before of the sort of catastrophic
leak you seem to have gotten.  Of course there are lots of things I haven't
heard of <g>.

david
David Beierl - Providence, RI
  http://pws.prserv.net/synergy/Vanagon/
'84 Westy "Dutiful Passage"
'85 GL "Poor Relation"