[b]Stripes:
ORIGINAL: William Robison
It isn't the antifreeze that does the job, it's the additives.
I base this on practical experience, not laboratory testing. When working with heavy trucks we had a cooling system that held some 40 gallons of water/glycol mix. Annual replacement of the antifreeze in a fleet of several thousand units would have been a healthy expense all by itself.
For reasons I wwont go into here, diesels are more prone to damage from cooling system contamination than our gasoline powered cars, so the protection was important.
By using a product from the Nalco Chemical company called "Nalcool 2000" in the cooling system, adding one pint every 16000 miles we kept the inside of the system looking factory fresh.
My conclusion from this was that the glycol kept doing its job, but its job wasn't cleaning the system. The Nalcool replenished the cleaning ability.
Further note - when we would take an owner's unit on contract maintenance one of the things we did was a coolant check. Dirty system? Add Nalcool, cleaned it right up.
Side note- all true soaps are phosphates by definition. Not all soaps are good for washing your hands though.
Cleaning soaps are in a class called "Wetting agents." They will bind solid particles to water molecules. Not all wettig agents are soaps, there are also detergents that do the same thing, but they aren't phosphates, and they aren't soaps.
Trisodium phosphate is a commercial soap, not uncommonly used for cleaning concrete floors. Still available, but the Eco-Nazis don't like it. Downunder's powdered dish soap may have a percentage of TP in it.
A good detergent is potassium permanganate. This is a deep purple powder, it's used for cleaning the ion exchange resins in older water softener systems. It is far more poisonous than ethylene glycol, but it rinses freely from the resin tanks in your water system so used properly there is no danger to your health.
The Nalcool 2000 I mentioned looks like it could well be potassium permanganate, so I think it's another compound worth a try for cleaning engine parts. Just be careful.
Hope this helps, and maybe encourages more experimentation.
Bill.
EDIT>>spelling. wr.