Possible Audi Coolant Bottle Fail

Hello everyone,

After reading many articles on-line I'm going to put my own experience out there, on how I possibly missed a heafty price tag with my cooling system. I'm lead to believe that on all pre-facelift and some facelift models have a small sack within the coolant bottle that goes bad between 4-5 years of the car being used and in the worst case ruptures. This small bag contains a small residue i can only assume is silica.

Please see my bag below, i am currently daily driving a Tuned Audi A3 8V pre-facelift 2.0 TDI 2016. My bag is a brown/black colour and is still in-tact.



After taking this bag out of the bottle that was marked “mit silikat” i noticed that there was a strong flow of what i can only describe as a black sand coming out of the bag. This came off the bag and onto my finger as i was pulling the small back out the tiny bottle opening, please see the below pictures...


My worry is that this “black sand” residue may have made its way into my cooling system and possibly could cause a fault. I have read horror stories on this topic where the bags have burst and cost upwards of £500+ getting the radiator fixed and all the fluids drained. I hope fully have caught this issue before it became to much of a clog in the pipeline.

However, I decided to do a little test as i was cleaning up the mess made by pulling the bag out... i wrapped the bag in a baby wipe to soak up some of the excess coolant liquid that was oozing out of it. I found the the “black sand” like material was transferring from the bag to the baby wipe also, please see the picture below.



This further backed up my point of hopefully catching it before it became to much of an issue.

Has anyone else had this issue or has had the bag burst ?
Please let me know if you plan to take the bag out also ?

Thanks again - Aaron

Phutters said:

Anything here that might help?

.

Click to expand...

My coolant tank is much the same colour as yours when you shine a light into it, a yucky kinda brown brown residue around the inside out the tank wall.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Matt Titanium said:

Are you sure this brown residue is from the contents of the bag? It's the wrong colour.
It looks more like contaminated coolant and the bag has acted as a trap/filter collecting the brown stuff as it has circulated through the expansion bottle.
I would wash the bag thoroughly and check the integrity of the bag and that the silica isn't leaking out.

Click to expand...

I will wash the bag today and give you an update i never thought about this outcome but it sounds every bit as possible as anything else, ill take some pictures and share when done. Thanks