interceptor

 

clicked

 

yea the pump cant be mounted on its side. however when you get rid of the factory pump and bracket there is lots of room to mount it between the starter and a/c compressor.

 

i have also installed a more powerful intercooler pump, i haven't done any truly conclusive testing, but it is my belief that heat soak is held off a bit longer and it returns to normal temps fairly quickly now. I haven't really seen lower temps with my pump, but again i haven't done back to back testing i'm just repeating things that i have noticed.

If you're serious about getting some power its probably worth it, but $200 for something that doesn't even give any hp gain, thats a nice little chunk of change. Probably more worth it using the m62 and smaller pulley's.

I ended up making a bracket and strapping it to the crossbeam in front of the motor, there definitely is a lot of space, but you need to be smart about where you want to route the hoses. I went through at least 2 or 3 different ways of routing after installing.

 

needs an update

I'm looking into one of these to replace my dead pump and want to see how the OP did it....if he has it done yet...

 

nope, still not done yet. i lack time, when i have time its pouring rain and i have no shop to work in.

 

update: its all on. today i had nothing to do at work so i tore into this. the new pump is on, so is the dual pass end plate and option b setup.





that is the bracket i made for the pump. nothing to fancy, its just 3/16" thick aluminum plate, its 4"x9", it bolts to the manifold support bracket were the stock pump bracket bolts to. the knotch is to clear the dipstick tube and the oilpan.



you can see were the bracket bolts on. the pump bolts from the back, i had to re-clock the pump to the inlet and outlet were on the correct side.



that is the diagram i used for plumbing. it was the simplest and proves to work well. i havent had any issues bleeding the system. for the plumbing, well, i redid a lot of it, but used most of the original hoses for the bends. wiring the pump was no big deal, i just cut off the factory pigtail and soldered the new one on. the pump draws less than 5 amps, so its good on the factory circuit.



the dual pass install was as per usual, the only exception to it is the tank i used for "option b". i use a small tank i found on summitracing.com. it has a 3/8 pipe bung in the bottom, i welded on a 3/4" tube for the hose to fit on and had to weld brackets to it. it has 1/4 pipe bungs in either side with small holes (id guess around .060") drilled in the center, so i used that as my restrictor.

now i know your all waiting for results, well, i dont have much. it started snowing today (was supposed to be 1" in high elevations, everywere has more than 8" now) so i didnt get to do any pulls, but what i can tell you is tha i have dropped about 20 degrees, and it never climbed over 90 degrees sitting in traffic on my snowey 2 1/2 hour drive home (its normally 35 minutes). ambient was 33 degrees and on average i was seeing 55 degrees, climbing when i was at a stop. for the record im also running a cobra heat exchanger. so far, seems like a good upgrade, however id someone can refresh my memory on how much of a temp drop is normally seen with a dual pass it would help my results.

ill leave you with one last pic of when i pulled into my driveway tonight

 

Awesome.

 

coolski

 

Sno-Balt!!!

 

I'm sorry to burst your bubble and I'll probably get flamed (once again) for posting but:

-That pump is not that reliable
-It will not flow anywhere near 20GPM in your car
-Your numbers for flow and current draw on the stock pump are off

On top of that it weighs more than stock, draws more current and could cause an issue with the PCMs pump control circuitry. I don't think it will as the current draw is only a little higher but the turn on amperage is high on that pump. May not be an issue with the PCM soft start but I believe a factory pump to me far superior.

 

thats why we experiment... for the good and for the bad results

 

ohhhhh

 

-please tell me why and show me proof that this pump is not reliable. ive used meziere pumps for years on race and street cars and have never once had an issue with one.
-20gpm is the open flow of the pump, rated the same way as the stock bosche pump. i wont say that its 20gpm in the car, i have nothing to back that up, however it does flow more than the stock pump (in ratings, almost 3x more flow)
-the pump came with a 15 amp fuse, the stock fuse is a 15 amp. if the stock circuit can handle 15 amps from a stock pump, it can take a pump thats recomended to run a 15 amp fuse.

the weight of the pump is negligable. i dont beleive the pcm uses a soft start to turn the pum pon, i dont see how it would using a relay connected to 12 volts and the pump directly to ground. as for the factory pump being superior, i dont see it. the bosche pumps are known for burning up in very little time, i had mine replaced under warrenty and less than a year later i was starting to have issues again. when i was looking for this pump i turned to the cobra/lightning guys to see what they used, and this meziere was the best one recomended. there were a couple guys that had been running them for 5+ years with no issues whatsoever, on daily driven cars, so i dont have any reliability concerns. even so, the pump is fully rebuildable with parts just a call t meziere away.

im not flaming, i would just like to see what you have to support that this pump is not a good choice.

 

i know on the meziere site they guarantee their pumps for 3000 hours. pretty damn good to me

 

yea seems pretty good guarantee. i figure if i was to drive my car for 2 hours every day, wich is a gross exadgeration, thats still only 710 hours, seems to fall quite short of what you think an oem product should last. going by mezieres guarantee, this pump should last me 4-5 years minimum.

 

ZZPerformance has been selling liquid to air intercoolers for many years. We had to source pumps for our kits, warranty them, etc. We also needed to do extensive research on many, many components for our race cars. One of these cars was a 97 Grand Prix, which despite the dismisals here, is very similar to the Cobalt in some regards. It is FWD, it dyno's 195WHP stock, it runs mid to high 14's stock and it has an Eaton blower on it stock. We set out to do what people said was impossilbe. We wanted to run 10's with the stock blower, stock engine, no wheelie bars, no crazy expensive one off parts. We were actually told 11's was impossible. We were told 350WHP was the limit of that motor with the stock blower. In the end we ran 10.8 and dyno'd 410WHP. No company (although intense spent years trying) ever came close and the record still stands by over a 1/2 second IIRC.

So getting back on topic, to extract the most out of the car everything had to be tested and tried. Components had to be light, the IC pump had to be chosen carefully along with EVERY aspect of the IC system. During this time we tested about 10 pumps from various vendors and one of them was the Meziere pump discussed in this post. It does not perform as advertised. We tested multiple pumps so we knew just one wasn't defective.

Back to our intercooler sales. We have sold hundreds and hundreds of intercooler kits which we have to include pumps with. We carried Mezeire for a while and we are still a Mezeire distributor. We could not continue to use the pumps because of a high failure rate. Keep in mind that manufactures claims are just that, claims. This is not a regulated industry. You can claim any flow, any pump life, any current draw, etc. That doesn't make it true. Some of you haven't been in this industry long so it may come as a shock. If you're familiar with car audio amplifiers you know the deal. Wattage rating doesn't mean much for actual power.

In terms of reliability, Bosch has an excellent name and reputation around the world. Their liquid pumps are used as factory equipment in Mercedes, Ford, GM, and others. OEMs spend enormous sums on testing products like this. The Bosch pumps would not be used with the frequency they are if they had to be warranteed all the time. The cost of replacing blown engines alone would cause OEMs to run. But they stick with Bosch and for good reason.

So understanding that ZZP does not sell any upgraded pump for the Cobalt and we do not sell the OE pump but we do carry Meziere, I would think my statements could be trusted as genuine with no alterior motive. I really wish people here were more leary of companies selling parts rather than being so quick to want to 'mod' their car.

The factory intercooler pump is really quite amazing. Not only for its flow characteristics but for reliability, noise, weight and current draw as well. If you want more info on ZZP testing of pumps: http://www.zzperformance.com/cobalt_ion/articles.php
We did a quick but extensive test on intercooler pumps simply for the sake of bringing this type of information to the Cobalt community. Most people do not have the facilities or opportunities to gather this information on their own. ZZP does this type of testing constantly, investing more money into R&D that does not result in a sellable product than any aftermarket company I'm aware of. Certainly in the markets we're in (I should add to avoid being called out). We are a company that searches out the best ways to mod your car and we frequently publish the parts you don't need to buy which is just as important if you want to go fast and be reliable.

 

why do so many factory pumps fail then?

 

I'd guess impure voltage going to the unit.

For what it's worth, my 04's pump still works just fine, and it even had the wiring backwards for 50k miles. (68k now)

 

some people have no problems, others have nothing but problems. i found this to be true not only for the lsj community but also the cobra/lightning guys. with the amount of failures i read about and having 2 pumps fail myself, i was forced to look for an alternative. sure bosche pumps are cheap on e-bay, but by the time i get one its not so cheap, and weeks away. like i said, ive put lots of meziere products on different applications and always had top quality and no failures. these applications range from small block chevys to big block chryslers, no failures, and thats part of the reason i went wit this pump. i will restate what i said on the first page i did not buy this pump purely to improve on cooling, i bought it for a reliable pump many people have had great luck with this model.

your testing may not have shown that this pump is the answer, and it may not be. however, to my knowledge, im the first to try it on an lsj, and so far, it seems to work a heck of a lot better than the bosche. if it last more than a year ill be happy, and if it fails, its servicable.

hopefully ill have some better numbers to give tomorow, the snow is almost clear now.

 

Because there are hundreds of thousands of them in use and very few other pumps compared. How many cobalt owners post that their pump did not fail? Not many but there are 35, 573 users on this board alone. A large % of them have an LSJ. So if you figure 20,000 users with LSJs on the board (just rough guess) and 20 people post about a failed pump it's very reliable. In selling aftermarket pumps if we have less than a 5% failure rate I consider it good. (our Mezeire fail rate over time was prob 20%) OEMs would probably not accept 5% but I wouldn't know...

A quick google search/calculation gave me a guess of ~300 hours of run time per 10,000 miles on the car. Any pump subject to outdoor elements, drastic temperature swings, constant vibration, etc is going to have a hard time surviving. We have seen a couple failed pumps come through the shop but I consider the factory failure rate pretty low. When we race our Cobalts we'll be using the OEM pump. Personally I've never seen a pump that can freeflow ~8gpm in 3/4 lines with 13.x volts while weighing around 2 pounds. I was and am amazed.

 

ive read a lot more than 20 people having problems, the fact that i had 2 burn up in a year doesnt lie. yes the failure rate in the grand scheme of how many are out there is low, but i just dont have time or money to replace a pump once a year.

out of curiosity, do you happen to have the flow rates both open and fitted to the intercooler, current draw, and what was failing in the meziere pumps???

 

http://www.zzperformance.com/cobalt_...les1.php?id=62

I recall a failure where a Meziere was running but not pumping. Sent it back and they repaired it. I remember another where the electric motor died. Those are two off the top of my head. It's been years since we sold that WP136 or whatever the # is. We also tested them for flow and they don't do 20GPM freeflow. They flow a lot but that's expected with pretty high current draw and with them being so large and heavy.

I understand what you're saying about the 2 stock pumps failing and I wouldn't want to run them either after that. Especially since they are expensive as you posted. However, you also need to understand that if all the Cobalts and Redlines were failing like your car, GM could never warrnaty them and would go out of business... errr ummm, wait a minute, LOL But no seriously, Bosch would have to eat that and no company could survive a disaster of even 10% failure rates on cars while under warranty.
I don't know what's up with your car. Could be an electrical issue, could be a coolant blockage, could be a fluke, how many miles were on your car and were both bosch pumps new?

 

the original pump died at 59k km, the next one at 79k km, although i kept that going for a few months with the hatrikstu hammer mod lol. i have flushed the heat exchanger system, the temps are always evern across the heat exchangers (as best i can measure) so i dont suspect blockage. my car has had a cobra heat exchanger installed since before i bought the car. it would be interesting to see the effects of a 2nd heat exchanger on the longevity of the pump, it seems most people reporting failures, not only here but over at modular ford forums, have a modified intercooler system.

end result is i have the pump on. weather it flows 20 gpm or not, its still more than the bosche. i am very curious to know how it will affect the system, from what i have read about the laminova cores, the increased flow can only help make them more efficient. the manufacturor recommends 10gpm through a single core for max efficientcy. running dual pass, it cuts the flow in half, if in reality im flowing 12gpm, thats 6gpm through 2 cores, in theory should be better than 3gpm of the stock pumps output. i guess we will see though.

on a side note, does anyone know offhand how much of a temp drop is usual for the dual pass/option b??? ill need this to come up with a decent conclusion.

 

The stock pumps are no different than other electrical pumps. Many times you can take them apart, clean them and put them back together and they'll work. I'll do a write up some time if people are interested. If your pump would turn back on with a hammer, this can be fixed pretty easily. I would guess from miles your first stock pump lasted 1000 hours, this isn't that bad. Could be better, could be worse. Was your 2nd pump purchased new?

flowing in stock configuration the cores are restrictive. you could never flow 10GPM through the cores unless you had a positive displacement pump (a big one). It would probably require ~5psi of pressure to do that because the area of flow is so small


Installing a dual pass doesn't cut the flow in 1/2 because the pump output will increase 40% in probably both a stock and Mezeire pump. The Mezeire will not do 12GPM in any restricted system so it's not a good # to use. I will say that all these types of pumps flow more as voltage increases and it would be pretty easy to do a relay turnon fed off of the alternator for more volts. I'll get into that project to I guess. (add to the long list)

Temp drop on option B is going to be highly dependent on whether you are running dual HE's, what size pulley you have, and what your rpm is when you measure.