The serpentine belt is a very important wear item on your car that can be easily overlooked. Common Symptoms of a Bad Serpentine Belt Squealing noise especially after driving through a puddle Cracks, visible damage, or glazed appearance Related Maintenance Services The following services are commonly performed along with a serpentine belt replacement : Idler pulley shown below Tensioner pulley Water pump Idler pulley Claim Your Custom Maintenance Schedule Get the FIXD Sensor and free app today for a custom maintenance schedule based on your make, model, and mileage.
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Mechanic comes to you. Free 50 point safety inspection. See availability. When to consider replacing the serpentine belt: Regularly scheduled maintenance.
Typically, belt manufacturers recommend belt replacement at 90, miles. However, the belt must be inspected for wear or damage at regular intervals prior to this high mileage.
Squealing noise, belt slippage, visible belt damage. Should the belt fail or wear out prematurely, you may hear noise or you may see visible signs of deterioration such as missing chunks of rubber, excessive cracking, or a shredded appearance on the edge of the belt. Battery Light. A loose belt, perhaps caused by a defective tensioner, may not drive the alternator at adequate speed and thus the battery may discharge, causing the warning light to illuminate.
Engine overheating. Often, the serpentine belt drives the water pump. In those applications, if the belt breaks the engine will overheat in seconds to minutes. If the belt is inadequately tensioned, you may notice higher-than-normal engine operating temperature. How do mechanics replace the serpentine belt? Prior to removing the belt, the mechanic must run the engine to determine if the idler pulley and the belt tensioner are noise-free.
Those rotating components have grease filled bearings and are subject to wear. In addition, the mechanic will ensure that all pulleys and accessories are turning in the same plane. These steps help make sure your new belt will operate trouble-free for its full-service life. The belt tensioner is released, usually with a wrench or lever, to release the tension from the belt. With the tension off, the belt slides off the pulleys.
All rotating components — that is the alternator, air conditioner compressor, etc. If everything checks out, the new belt is slipped over all of the pulleys while holding the tensioner away from the belt. Once the belt is centered on all pulleys, the tensioner is released and the installation is complete.
A malfunctioning air conditioner can be attributed to a lot of things. Since the serpentine belt keeps the air conditioner functional, a bad serpentine belt will take that function away from it.
If you turn on your air conditioner and see that it does not blow out cool air from the air vents, this could possibly be due to a bad serpentine belt. If the front area of your vehicle makes squealing sounds, then your serpentine belt might be misaligned or slipping.
Sometimes it might just take a realignment or proper tensioning of your serpentine belt to fix this problem. The serpentine belt allows the power steering system to function properly. Power steering is what gives drivers the ability to smoothly steer their vehicle without needing to apply too much arm strength.
If you have a bad serpentine belt, then it will be harder to move the steering wheel to steer your vehicle. This issue could also be caused by low power steering fluid. The serpentine belt is what activates the water pump which helps cool the engine.
This means that your engine will begin to overheat since it cannot be cooled down anymore. You will see this happening as the temperature gauge on the dashboard shows the needle moving toward the red zone.
The serpentine belt is easy to access in most cars. If you want to know if your belt is bad, simply open the hood and look at the belt for yourself.
If you notice visible cracks or damage to anywhere on the belt, this means the belt is bad and needs to be replaced right away. A vehicle can often run without a working alternator for a bit of time, but not for long.
If the belt is too loose to maintain grip on the alternator pulley, you may experience a similar symptom as a snapped belt. If you start to notice a whine from the engine that changes with engine speed, you may want to have the tension of the serpentine belt double checked.
A belt that is too tight puts too much load on the bearings in each of the accessory pulleys and can often cause premature failure of those components.
One of the most common failure modes for water pumps is actually bearing failure, caused by a serpentine belt that was too tight. Taxes and fees will be added onto these prices too. The ease of accessing the serpentine belt will determine how much the labor costs are. Some model vehicles have the serpentine belt easily accessible, which means the labor should take under one hour. But if the belt is in a more complicated area, it could take about 2 hours. Easy to reach belts can actually be changed at home with minimal tools.
Some belts can be removed by loosening one bolt, while others have a belt tensioner you have to pull on with a wrench to give the belt some slack. You might consult a repair manual for your specific vehicle to see if you can do this yourself.
Either way, this is certainly one of the cheaper components of an engine that you will ever have to replace. It is better you replace this immediately than risk more expensive components getting damaged.
I get a price of Is this honest price? It still blows cold air but just started squealing and making a lot of noise in the passenger dash area. My car was in an accident. They got it blowing cool and it only gets cool after the car has been running or if in a cool spot.
Now it wont cool at all. Any ideas what it could be?
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