How much water do you carry?

[Chaz]

Were running an unblown 383  500hp small block. Is 20 gallons enough water to carry for adequate cooling? Is there some formula or rule of thumb for this? Thanks in advance.

[WZ JUNK]

Gasoline or alcohol ?   You are probably okay either way as we ran less water with more HP and on gasoline.  Do you plan to run a thermostat?  Alcohol does not require very much cooling water, in fact it is difficult to preheat the engine with alcohol.  The original tank that I had made was about 16 gallon.  It cooled the engine with no problems but now we are making more power and more heat.   I built a new 30 gallon tank this last year.  Even though we will make even more power this year I do not plan to make a bigger tank.

John 

[RichFox]

I doubt you are ever going to be able to warm up 20 gal. before running the car. Are you going with an electric prewarmer? I bet 10 gal is a better choice unblown.

[WZ JUNK]

Our present setup uses a thermostat.  We preheat the engine until the thermostat opens and then shut the engine off.  This allows us to heat the engine but keep most of the water in the water tank cool.  We had a lot of discussion on this before we tried it this way and it seems to work fine.  It would take us a long time to heat up our 30 gallons of water and then we would lose all of that cooling effect.

John

[SPARKY]

I would set up my system where I could warm the eng and not circulate the water that is in the tank during that time ---run a pressurised system by all means.