Yeah, so, my van seems incapable of running longer than a week or two
without something happening, dang it.

You all may recall I had written about the red blinky light coming back on
just after starting the van up. There was plenty of coolant, and the temp
seemed fine, though I discovered it was leaking a small amount of coolant
from the lower thermostat housing.

I took the van into my local Volvo shop because they love working on vans
and they're closer than 40 miles away. They fixed it and cleaned it up
inside and out, an additional service I got for "free" from many visits
getting vehicles repaired. The van looked and ran great . . . for a while.

Last Saturday, I bought a "new" car to trim down my fleet of vehicles. I
know, that doesn't make sense. I bought it so I could get rid of my POS BMW
wagon, plus we're giving my wife's Volvo to my daughter. New car is a 1999
Volvo V 70 R with 81K miles on it. Woot!

Back to the van, I was driving the van up to the DMV to take care of stuff
for the new car and I noticed that whenever I went uphill, big clouds of
white "smoke" went billowing out the back. Well, I noticed this when I was
about a mile from home, so I took it back home and grabbed a different car
to go to the DMV. Sigh...

I checked the van later and, while I can't see any signs of a leak, the
coolant reservoir is empty and the expansion tank is down by about an inch.
For the moment, I'm thinking that the shop, after replacing the thermostat
housing failed to deal with any coolant having been lost during the work,
and/or bleeding the system...

There's no end with this van...
Marc Perdue