I made myself a partial grille block, out of tape. Gorilla Tape to be exact, and I'm pretty pleased.
Ok, it looks pretty bad from up close. But I'm not concerned with my car's appearance anyway. And from more than 15 or 20 feet, you can barely tell it's there. As far as performance, it works well in cold weather, helping my car warm up faster. And the it seems to have a little bit of an aerodynamic effect too. But I didn't do A-B-A testing, so it's tough to entirely verify either of those claims.
The problem is, on semi warm days, around 50 or 60 degrees (10 to 15C) the coolant temps rise what seems to me to be too high. I have seen the scan gauge report as much as 230F (110C) with the grille block while the normal temp without the block was usually 188F (86C)
So, my questions are as follows. Is that an unacceptable increase in coolant temp? The problem is worse at low RPMs and high engine loads (city driving), it usually is fine at medium to high RPMs and low loads (highway). Is is possible that my water pump is going bad or bad to begin with and it can't circulate the coolant fast enough?
Here's a picture of the grille block, I can't get it to embed properly.
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