How To Service the Coolant System in Your Car or Truck How to Replace or Flush Antifreeze Yourself

Hey guys, I'm Andy. In this video, I'm gonna show you how to service your cooling system so you don't run into problems down the road. Some of the reasons why you wanna service your cooling system is you're gonna prolong the life of your engine parts, such as your radiator, or even your heater core, your water pump, anything that's related to coolant. If you don't do this, you're gonna have corrosion built up there and it's gonna cause leaks. One of the first things you wanna do when you decide you're gonna do a coolant flush or a service is checking your owner's manual, that way you can tell the intervals for when you're supposed to change the fluid, what type of fluid, and how much fluid you're gonna need. Here we can see what type of coolant to use. This vehicle requires Dex-Cool, and you can see the intervals, 5 years or 150,000 miles. Now 150,000 miles seems like a lot but at least you wanna do it every five years. And it's important to note not to mix other types of coolants with the coolant that's recommended for the vehicle. If you mix the coolant types, you can clog up your heater core, or radiator, cause other corrosion in the coolant system. When you're under the hood of the vehicle you wanna check and find out where your coolant reservoir is and also where the radiator cap is. If your vehicle doesn't have a radiator cap, some vehicles have it directly on the coolant reservoir. It's extremely important when the vehicle is hot not to take off the radiator cap or reservoir cap. When the engine is hot, there is pressure in the coolant system, and if you take that cap off, the pressure is gonna come out and could cause some major burns. Maybe you don't know when the last time the coolant was changed, maybe you just bought the vehicle and you wanna do a visual check, what you can do is take a look at the coolant itself, if it looks like it's brown, it's time to change it, or if the color doesn't match what the vehicle is required, then you should change it as well. Or if you have a vehicle like this where the coolant system is extremely dirty when we take the cap off, and you can see all the sludge buildup in there, and that's gonna be in your entire coolant system. So you definitely want some type of cleaner to go through this vehicle.

You can also get a coolant tester that can tell you the protection level. Now if it's too concentrated or it's too watered down, it's a good time to change it either way. Just take a little bit of the coolant out. So, you just fill this up with coolant and you can see where the protection level is. And you want it somewhere around -35 degrees. When you're using some type of cleaner make sure you follow the directions on the specific bottle. If you take a look at the coolant system, and the coolant really doesn't look too bad, you can do probably what we're doing today which is just a draining the coolant system and filling it back up. With the engine cold we can remove the radiator cap. Underneath the vehicle, you can see where the radiator is, and you wanna follow the radiator and see if there's any drains. Most of the time the drains are on the ends of the radiator. In the event that your vehicle does not have a drain like this one, you're gonna have to remove the lower radiator hose. You wanna make sure you have a catch bucket underneath the location of the lower radiator hose. Now we'll take the clamp off and you just try to slide the hose back. If you have to, you can use a pry bar or some type of pick to try to slide the hose off. Just be careful because the coolant is gonna come out pretty fast. Let all of the coolant drain out.

Now the radiator's completely drained out, so we can reattach the hose, or if you had a drain you can put the drain plug back in. Draining the radiator out has only drained about half of the coolant out of the entire coolant system. Now on some vehicles, you may have a drain on the side of the engine block. If you have a V8, it's something like a truck, you'll have a drain on one side, underneath the exhaust manifold, and a drain on the other side. You could drain those out and get about 80% of the coolant out of the entire system. If you don't have those drains in the engine, what you can do is repeat the steps of draining the coolant and filling it multiple times. With all the coolant out of the radiator, before we wanna fill the coolant system, we wanna extract it out of the reservoir. Now you can use something like this, which is a fluid extraction pump. It might take a little bit of time but you'll be able to get it all out, or you could always, if you want to, remove the reservoir from the vehicle and dump it into a bucket. Now we're ready to add the coolant. It's gonna help out a lot if you have a funnel like this. You can actually put this on the radiator, it makes it significantly easier, and you wanna add the appropriate coolant. Whatever you checked in the owner's manual earlier, that's what you wanna use. You want a 50/50 mix. Some coolant comes pre-diluted and you don't have to mix it with water. If you are mixing it with water, make sure it's with distilled water then there's no other elements in there. And we can fill the radiator right up. After the coolant system is all filled up, we wanna start the engine and run it for about 10 minutes. It's gonna circulate the coolant through the system, mixed in with the old if you didn't drain the block at all. And while you're doing this, make sure you monitor the coolant temp sensor. You don't want that going into the red and cause other damage. In our case, because we only drained the radiator, we only drained about half the coolant out. So what we would wanna do at this time, let the vehicle cool down, once it's cooled down, drain the coolant again, and add fresh coolant. That's gonna give you a better percentage of more of the old coolant being replaced by new coolant. After you're all done, all of that, and you'll let the vehicle cool down, check the coolant level, and adjust accordingly. With your old coolant, you wanna make sure you dispose of it properly. Take a funnel, put it in the jug of the coolant, the empty jug, and then put the dirty coolant in it. And you can bring this to a recycling center that deals with coolant. So that's an easy way for you to do your own coolant service. If you enjoyed this video and it helped you out, make sure you subscribe to our channel, ring the bell, turn on all notifications so you don't miss any of our videos.