Congratulations on getting it all back together and running. Good going. From the previous posts I was afraid it was going to take you longer.

On the coolant loss issue, I'm a little confused. It seems that you saw a severe leak at the heater hose area, and now you are asking us why the coolant level is dropping.

I'm going to go way out on a limb here, and say that the most likely cause for the coolant level dropping is that there is a severe leak in the heater hose area. Don't worry about why it leaks sometimes and not others. It isn't supposed to leak ever.

After you fix that, be aware that you can run into problems getting all the air pockets out of the cooling system after it has been drained. Sometimes letting it idle with the pressure cap off until the t-stat opens will help it burp. Sometimes I remove little overflow hose from the expansion tank, put a clean hose on the expansion tank nipple, put the pressure cap on, and blow into the clean hose while holding the overflow hose up in the air until I have forced the air out. I don't feel like going out to look under the hood at the moment to see that these are valid instructions for the Volvo, but it likely is. I did it that way the other day on a friends Benz.

Charley