How to Replace Thermostat 2003-10 Dodge RAM

Okay friends, real quick before we get started on this job, hands and eyes, we're going to be dealing with chemicals. With that said, we want to make sure we drain the coolant and then we're gonna flush the system to make sure we can start off with brand new coolant by the time we're done. Let's go ahead and remove our radiator cap. Set that aside. Noticing that you have a plastic radiator and a plastic petcock, you might also find that the petcock just doesn't want to come out of there. If that's the case, obviously, you don't want to continue because you could damage the radiator. So we're going to move right along over here which is the lower hose to the thermostat housing. Remove the clamp. Just be prepared because coolant will come down. I like to put a nice funnel or a box carved out like this so it will direct it into a nice bucket. At this point, we're gonna slowly take this off of here and try to direct this into our recycling receptacle. The next thing we need to do is remove our two mounting bolts. You'll have one here and one right up there. That's going to get the thermostat housing out of the way. There's one. There's the second one. Give this a little shake, it should want to break free. A little bit more coolant coming out. There we are.

Now it's going to be time to get our thermostat out of the housing itself. Something I want you to pay attention to is this right here. We need that to line up with this area on the housing. So remember that when you go to install your brand new one. I'm just gonna take my screwdriver, come on the back side and just see if I can pop this out. There we are. Next thing we're going to want to do is clean up the surfaces on our housing so we have a nice clear area where the gasket's gonna ride. Now it's gonna be time to install our brand new thermostat. Pay attention to that little weep hole there, we want it to line up with this area right there. Go ahead and put it in. Squeeze it in so it's sitting flush. All right, let's get ready for our install into the vehicle. Now let's just go ahead and put something in the hole here to try to protect the area. Let's clean it up around the area where that gasket's gonna ride. Now that we have this area nice and cleaned down, let's go ahead and reinstall our thermostat housing here. Starting both the bolts, we'll snug them up and then we'll torque them to 112-inch pounds. All right, let's torque this. So now we're going to slip the hose on to the thermostat housing here until it's completely bottomed out against the housing. Once we get the clamp on there, we want to make sure it's approximately an eighth of an inch away from the end of the hose and of course we'll snug it up.

Gonna be time to fill the cooling system. You want a nice funnel like this and you want to make sure you use the proper coolant. You want to use coolant that's either orange or of course, the universal coolant, but definitely not green. I'm gonna go with universal here. I'm gonna fill it right up. Now after you've run your vehicle for a while and you've burped out all the air in it, you want to make sure you go ahead and put your radiator cap back on here. Push this right down. Turn it so it's nice and tight. And now we're going to fill the overflow. Okay, close the hood. Take it for a road test.