forgive me if this has already been answered, but does anyone know if they make a lower temp thermostat for the jk? and what the stock one opens at? i am guessing 195 stock. thanks in advance!!

 

You can buy a 180 at Autozone for the JK. When I was running a Jet stage 2 chip the 180 thermostat made my mpg bad, put stock thermostat back in and mpg came back. I am now running a Hypertech tuner and a 180 thermostat with no effect on mpg.

Chris

 

Pretty pointless to drop the t-stat temp on newer vehicles..Just my 2cents

 

i used to have a 04 ram with 5.7, and i was runnin a magnFLOW dual exhaust, a jet stage 2 chip, and a 180 degree tstat. truck FLEW! ran awesome on 93. only thing was heat was not at hot and the obvious temp guage drop too. but it flew. was hopin someone would say the same for soccer mom engine!

 

The Hemi with a tuner is what made it fly, definitely not the thermostat. The 3.8L is going to run like a dingy in the ocean no matter what you do. The t-stat is really just going to waste time, money and coolant.

 

Has anybody actually replaced the t-stat on the JK? Let's see some real-world first-hand seat-of-the-pants no-$hit opinions (I just found the hyphen key!! )

 

Yup. My dingy looks pretty small next to a Hemi.

Wait. What?

 

well thanks for the input all. i like the dingy reference!! hahaa. guess ill just use the $$$ for gas.

 

Most tuners recomend running a 180 t-stat. There are plenty of different opinions out there but i still would like to know where to get one. Someone mentioned Autozone...got a part #? i have also herd Summit Racint but had no luck. If someone knows of one please post it.

 

I don't think I'd go 180. These smog engines need to run hotter than in the past to run clean and deliver fuel economy. The issue with the JK is not the thermostat anyway. Part of it is when the fan comes on. Using the Superchips Flashpaq and having the fan come on at 200 for low and 210 for high makes a huge difference.

I also run B&M's biggest trans cooler (with it's own fan) and the combination of those two things has dropped the temps way down - as much as 50+ degrees onthe tranny and 25-35 on the engine. Most of the time when rock crawling my trans is 170 ish and the engine is 195-200.

And I have not addressed the larger issues of trapped hot air under hood and a grossly inadequate radiator. The only time I have gotten warmer than I was comfortable since the above mods was at around 11000 ft, heading west on I70 towards Denver, loaded as heavy as I ever have been (7 day camping trip with 10 gal of water, 10 gal of gas and lots of gear - 6720 pounds!), climbing at 60 mph floored in second gear. The engine got to 250 and I eased off. The trans was around 195! The problem here was/is the shitty factory radiator not having sufficient cooling capaicity. Adding hood vents or going to an aftermarket vented hood would help too.

Thinking about changing the thermostat is simply barking up the wrong tree. Although it has the advantage of being cheap (a curse of Jeep mods and the reason a lot of useless cheap crap is hung on Jeeps). For those of us in cold weather it would just slow down the warm up too. My Jk warms up quicker than anything I've come across other than Volvos.