I'm getting slightly bored of playing "Chase the perennial coolant leak" - whenever one leak is plugged another one pops up.

I'm looking at just replacing all of the hoses in big go and hoping that stops it, at least temporarily!

Looking online, almost all of the hoses seem to be Britpart and a few have Genuine Land Rover options available (at a not insignificant markup).

Are hoses one of the things that are generally OK to get from Britpart?

A hose is a hose so you would think they should be OK. I got one Britpart one that was too small and no amount of persuasion or lube would make it fit and I've heard that sometimes the ones with Tee's in them leak at the joins (or the plastic Tee's crack). Otherwise I can't see them being a problem.

That was my thought - surely there's very little that go wrong with a rubber hose.

I need to put a little bit of time in to making sure the current leak is actually hose first.

I can see coolant dripping off the front of the engine and I'm really, really hoping it's not the front cover/water pump gasket again. That was a ball ache last time :(

Bah.

Just been out at lunch to try and locate the leak (no luck) but as I was driving up and down the road to get the car to operating temp I found the ABS, traction control and handbrake lights coming on when the pedal is pressed :(

New accumulator time!

At least it's an easy job to do. Not quite the easiest though. Received an email from my mate in France who had discovered that the passenger side carpet was soaking wet (UK car), thought it might be an AC drain so thought he would ask me before tearing the dash apart. My reply was:
Put suspension on high and leave a door open (engine off). Crawl underneath and if you look up the side of the gearbox about where the cable connects, you'll see a conical rubber thing hanging out of the underside of the car. Squeeze that and you'll get water, mud and dead leaves all down your arm. You are spot on, it is the AC drain and they clog up.
Half an hour later I received this:
Yep, a thing a bit like a black rubber sea anemone.
Squeezed it and was rewarded with a T-shirt sleeve full of water with black scummy bits in.
I wish all P38 problems were as easy to fix!!

He can't say I didn't warn him, he just didn't expect there to be quite that much water in the drain tubes......

I have a feeling I'll be taking off the alternator, AC pump and power steering pump to try and locate my coolant leak.

It's leaking at quite a rate from somewhere above the oil filter:

On the topic of wet passenger footwells....I never did find the source of that leak either. Almost completely certain it's not the AC drains as it only ever happens after heavy rain!

Unless it's a core plug on that side of the block, I'd be looking at the heater inlet pipe. That's about all there is on that side that can leak. The pipe/hose layout on a GEMS is a bit different but I had to replace the steel section on mine as it was leaking.

Is that pipe visible in this image?

Yes, the shorter one attached to hose 14. but equally it could be the return as that is steel too. They are here, under Water Rail in the engine section rather than the cooling system for some unknown reason. There's also an O ring that would be where I would start.

I’ve just held my iPad over my head, lol, now I know where it is looking at the pics, I’d say a core plug or drain point

Whereabouts in RAVE are the core plugs?

I've had a poke around in Engine and Cooling but can't see them.

Wanted to see what needs to come off to access them so I can find the right place to check for my leak.

I also tried to find them on the LRCAT parts diagram website but I can't find them there either.

Scratch that...found them in RAVE. Did a CTRL-F search for core plugs.

Looks like there's three in the side of the engine, below the cylinders.

I'll check them now I know where they are but it looks like the leak is coming from somewhere on the front of the engine.

Looking at that diagram only really leaves the front cover gasket. Or another gasket on the engine itself.

They are on LRCat, Allbrit.de and microcat on page G02035, item 2, although all of them say for GEMS but the blocks are the same. You can get a set from various manufacturers from LRDirect (https://www.lrdirect.com/602152-Core-Plug-V8-Block/?keep_https=yes). There's 4 on each side of the block about half way up and you should be able to see them from underneath without taking anything off.

Also, if you look in RAVE at Overhaul Manuals (rather than workshop manuals), Engines, V8, Description and Operation, page 2, it shows a pretty grotty picture of the engine components. Core plugs are numbered 4.

Edit to say that you found it while I was looking it up....... Although that picture only shows 3 there's actually 4 on each side, one adjacent to each cylinder.

It would be unusual for the front cover to put the water round where the pic shows,
My moneys on a core plug or one of the steel pipes has corroded , shine a torch up and your should be able to see the core plugs, if it is them, exhaust manifold off to do them. Not advisable to drive as they can just pop, but saying that, how long has it been leaking ! ..

It's been leaking for a couple of weeks at varying rates. Sometimes not at all and sometimes quite bad (like in the images above).

I'll pop out at lunch and take a look at the plugs.

As for replacing them, if it is them, I guess it's just a simple task of prising the old ones out and hammering new ones in? Once the manifolds are off of course.

It is but I'd still suspect the O ring on the heater outlet rather than a core plug considering the age of your car. Unless you've been regularly driving it through sea water or it's been run for years with plain water in the cooling system I wouldn't expect core plugs to have rusted through this soon (unless LR ran short towards the end of the production run and bought some Britpart ones......).

The O-ring is still on the list of things to check :)

In the few years I've had it I've never run it with plain water in (never even topped up with water, always ready mix coolant) and when I got it it had proper coolant in too. I bought it from some kind of automotive engineering chap with a fleet of motorbikes, a big garage and huge tool box so I'm fairly confident that it was well looked after in the time he had it too. I don't know who had it before him though.

What's the purpose of a core plug? I appreciate that the plug is there to plug the hole, but why are the holes there in the first place? Pressure relief if the engine overheats?

Primary purpose of core plugs is to fill up the holes left in the casting so you can extract the sand, or whatever, core used to define the inside parts of the casting. Mostly waterways. Drive in plug is just the easiest way of doing the job. Make it the right shape and it has enough clearance to slip in easily yet a swift blow in the middle will cause it to expand evenly to grip all round for a nice seal. Popping out for pressure relief on freezing or very serious overheating is an incidental and very unreliable benefit.

Hate to say it but your droplets look very similar to the ones I had when spending 4 years, but only 12,000 miles, chasing a small water loss. In my experience unless the leak is pretty big, as in stop at regular intervals to top up size, visible droplets and tracks have more to do with under bonnet airflow and where the fan blows stuff than the actual location of the real leak. I fixed several small leaks that ought to have been about right for the coolant lost to little effect.

Even a good scrub down and a UV kit didn't really solve things although I got very suspicious of the water-pump. But I "knew" that was good cos it got a good inspection when I changed the (bodged) waiter pump gasket during a crankshaft seal change. Eventually it dumped enough overnight to be really sure that it was the pump seal. With 20/20 hindsight it was clear that the pump seal had been failing for a long time. Those things are pressure loaded so it would hold up once the car was up to temperature and the system properly pressurised but would leak during warm-up. So a larger, but still not huge, short term leak looked like a small all the time one.

Clive

I'm getting through a few litres of coolant per week so I'm sure there's a reasonably sized and fixable leak somewhere - I just need to find it.

This one has sprung up suddenly, I had several weeks of coolant-loss free motoring after the throttle body heater was bypassed but now I'm having to top up every couple of days.

Might wait for the FIL to get back from his holiday and see if he wants to spend a weekend taking a look at it with me, if inspecting the core plugs and heater pipes turns up nothing.

UV kit is your friend then. I got a Ring one off E-Bay, about £12 - £13 with the torch. Bottles of nostrum are about half that if you have a UV torch.

Instructions say to put it in and run engine for 20 minutes then look for evidence. Not so sure about that. I just got loads of little splatters all over the engine bay. Nice big easily seen path when the failing pump seal did let a tablespoon or two size puddle's worth out. Next time I shall start looking after about 5 minutes.

I drained out the radiator, mixed the dye in with the coolant and re-filled via a filter to collect all the entrained bits so it was properly mixed to start with rather than relying on it working its way down from the header tank. Syringing out the header might well have been enough tho'.

Clive