My motor is bone stock. The car's a 99. The coolant is topped off and I just added a couple capfuls of water wetter to try to bring temps down. Mine sits at just barely above straight vertical. Is this normal?

My subie's temps seemed to be cooler.

 

too high. Do you have air in the coolant system?

 

mine sits a tick cooler than vertical.

 

On the stock gauge? I assume yes. Has anyone ever "played" with the gauges? Put new faces on etc? If so all bets are off.

 

By coolant do you mean antifreeze? I run distilled water, water wetter, and a touch of antifreeze. I usually run zero antifreeze since it rarle freezes here.
When i first got the car it had a ton of antifreeze in it and the gauge was a bit over the halfway mark. With just the water and water wetter it was a bit under half way. When I added antifreeze this winter due to a pending freeze the temps rose almost half way. I didn't even put that much antifreeze in either.

 

Mine with the stock rad and stock power was barely a tick over vertical. With the big Koyo and turbo, same place, barely a tick over vertical. That's 195*F per Adaptronic and where the stock thermostat opens.

 

I'll probably drain and refill the cooling system and see what that does. Pretty sure there's no air in the system but I could be wrong. Gauges haven't been played with. Can't run straight water because I live in Montana. It snowed on my drive home today and it's May effing 4th.

 

Mine sits about a needle-width lower than half way.

 

lolz at people relying on the stock NB gauge.

it doesn't budge til around 230F. Then it starts to lean slightly to the right.

it will be fully vertical before the thermostat opens.

 

No kidding. Vertical in a NB ranges from 160 to 220+ as verified by VDO and Adaptronic.

 

Well I have an amazing and accurate NB needle. 200 degrees is like 9'oclock. Since getting a digital gauge I haven't hammered it yet so haven't see much higher. I also have a reroute.

 

My '99 runs at about 12 o'clock. Sometimes a few degrees to the left, sometimes a few degrees to the right. I don't get antsy if it's running a few degrees hot, but if it's running 30 or 40 degrees hot, something's wrong...

...oh wait, we're talking about thermal degrees? I was convinced this was an angular argument :P