White Smoke During Coolant Drain and Refill - What to do?

2014 Acura TSX about 110k miles. 4 Cylinder automatic transmission.

The maintenance reminder light came on to drain and refill the coolant. I was following the procedure and was using one of these funnel systems.


I noticed I didn’t have a water tight seal while letting the engine warm up, using the funnel with coolant in it, and letting the bubbles come out and be replaced by coolant in the reservoir. So I twisted the cap and spilled. No big deal. I turned the car off and wiped off what I could and restarted letting the engine warm up.

I got up to just under idle temperature, and I started noticing white smoke. I thought it could have been the coolant that I spilled, but it also seems to just be the coolant smoking in the funnel that I have on the radiator. So I turned off the car.

Should I just ignore the smoke and continue the process of waiting for two fan cycles and burping the loop, letting the bubbles come out?

To be clear. What I did is drain the radiator and reservoir. Refilled both. Tightened the cap on the reservoir, and left the funnel on the radiator. Was letting the engine warm up and wait two fan cycles, with the funnel still on the radiator with coolant in it, observing the bubbles come out

I have noticed that the coolant does seem to have a small leak somewhere, as far as the history of the car goes. About every two oil changes, the coolant goes from Full in the reservoir to about in the middle on the next oil change to almost at the Low level on the second oil change. This was before I started drain and refill procedure, and I got this as a used car. I didn’t notice any milky color oil last time I did the oil change, and was not able to find the leak. But it does appear to be leaking somewhere, at an excessive rate. I have had no overheating issues, and as long as I have had the car, it has never overheated.

I’m going to give this another try tomorrow at some point, all the old coolant that I spilled should have dried up by then.

So this morning I gave it another go.

I noticed that the overflow reservoir was about 3/4 full, when yesterday I had it at full. Likely just the last of the air working its way to the only place it could go, the reservoir, and being replaced with fluid from the reservoir.

The majority of the spilled coolant dried up, with still some residual puddles at the bottom of the engine bay.

I spilled very minor amounts of coolant down the radiator when installing the funnel. Got up to around idle temperature (but the fans did not turn on). and started noticing smoke. At first it seem to come from the radiator cap where I had spilled minor amounts of coolant, so I figured it was just coolant that I recently spilled burning off, no big deal. But then I started noticing smoke coming from the bottom of the radiator area, and then even smoke from the funnel system. Bubbles were coming out while it was warming up.

Any idea what the issue could be? Never noticed smoke before doing this job. All I did was loosen the petcock on the radiator and let old coolant pour out. Drained old coolant out of reservoir. Refilled reservoir. Refilled radiator using funnel system mentioned in previous post. Turned on car and let engine warm up without pressing the accelerator pedal.

Here’s some videos. Kind of hard to see the smoke, but hopefully this shows what I’m talking about or give some ideas.

Tried to capture some smoke, but kind of hard to see in the video, but you can see it in the first one.

I used 50/50 coolant that came already mixed.

Another odd thing I noticed is that on this car the hose from radiator to reservoir has no hose clamps on it, perhaps stock that way