1999 grand am overheats, please Help

Hello everyone. I have a 1999 grand am and i have a serious problem with the temperature gauge going to the maximum level. I have replaced the thermostat and it did not help. Does anyone know how i would test to see if it is the waterpump? Or are there any other test to find out if it is something else. Also if this helps the car has not been warming up, unless I have been on the highway. Basically there is no heat being thrown threw the vents even if the car sits at an idle for 30 minutes.

Thanks,


Jaime

Before you changed the thermostat was the coolant at the normal level?

There really isn't a good way to see if the waterpump is working, best bet is look for green stains / coolant leaking around the end of the shaft & at the hole in the water pump casting (at the bottom near the end of the shaft).

What size motor do you have, how many miles, all that info helps.

Does sound like you have a pump that quit on you though.

Also I always recomend either a dealer thermostat or Napa's best thermostat, its a cheap part and after having a few cheap autozone ones fail i'll never put another cheap one in any of my vehicles. If you replace your pump and have a cheap one in there i'd recomend taking the time to replace it with a good one. Until I had some fail on me, I never compared a cheap one to a dealer part, you'd be amazed at the differences!

If your worried about it being a head gasket do a compression test on all of the cylinders, that should tell you if you have a bad head gasket, but it sounds more like a water pump to me, but it never hurts to test.

You did get all of the air out of the system after you changed the thermostat didn't you?