How to Properly Flush Radiator Coolant

hi I'm Ben woodilla with popping mechanics and today on Saturday mechanic we're going to be flushing and changing the coolant on this car the first stage in this process is to actually get the coolant out in most cars there's a drain pipe or a tap on the back side of the radiator and what you do is you just twist it open and let it drain that way on this car there is no such tap so we're going to have to pull one of the hoses off of the radiator and drain it that way you're always going to want to pick the low hose at the bottom corner of the radiator and that'll that'll let you get it out there are a lot of ways that the clamps are held on for these hoses this car has got a clip that holds it together so we're going to pull that out and then we're going to be able to pull the hose out so I'm going to grab our screwdriver over here and most cars use a hose clamp to hold these coolant hoses on this one however uses these goofy clips and they're real pain in the butt to get off so if you have a bulk slided product you get to enjoy this too when we get ready to put it back together this just slides back over and fits in there to hold it on with that out of the way we're going to roll our pan over and pull the hose off keep in mind that you are going to get dirty here so don't have clean clothes on might even want to roll up your sleeves a little bit all right so I'm just going to reach up here with both hands and give this a tug you'll need to twist too a little bit to get it off try to catch everything that you can might not get it all but there's a lot going to come out you're going to want to let that drain out for a while a while it's going to drip for a long time and in the meantime you can probably clean up too cuz this stuff's sticky keep in mind that when you got this stuff out of the car you don't want to keep it around it's pretty toxic and it's also sweet so dogs like to lap it up you might end up with a curious kid that gets into it and that's not going to be anything anybody ever wants so keep it contained you're also going to want to take it to a recycling area uh lots of dumps will take it to recycle uh auto part stores will recycle it you just want to keep it in in a good safe place away from people and animals when you do the initial drain not all of the coolant comes out so you add water up at the top and run the engine for a little bit and that mixes things up so you get more more cooling out in the end the amount of water you're going to need varies from car to car uh and you you really should just fill it up to the uh the service line uh and go from there when you're doing this job you'll probably want to have a couple gallons maybe two three gallons of water on hand as well as two or three gallons of coolant it's so cheap it might as well get enough to do the job without having to run around so the reason we're doing this job is that it can save you a lot of money around here in the Detroit area it's about $100 to get your coolant flushed and for the cost of a couple of jugs at your auto part store you save a bunch of money it's probably only going to cost you about 10 or 20 [Music] bucks all right now that we've got all the cool drained out of the radiator we're going to come back up to the top and actually refill it we're going to put distilled water in and the reason is when you empty the coolant out you don't get all of it out and that's because you've got sort of two different areas of the coolant system you got one that cools the engine you've also got the other that heats your cabin that's called the heater core so we're going to add distilled water into it and then run it for a little bit what that'll do is it'll mix all the the cooling up and then we'll go back to the bottom and we'll drain it again so we get all that old junk out when you add this you want to make sure to add water to the right tank so we've got you know fill caps all over this thing you want to make sure to get the one that's attached to the radiator there's a there's an overflow line here and this line goes down into the radiator almost all of them have similar cues there's a little icon here that's for the the coolant you're also going to be able to find out which one's which in the owner's manual now that we've got all the old stuff mixed up with the water we can drain that out too all right since we've got most of the coolant out well most of it it's still dripping a little it's never going to really stop stop we're going to put the hose back on and then lower the car and put coolant back in so I'm going to slide this hose back over the top and reinstall our clip all right with that we're done under the car and we'll drop it and now put some Cooling [Music] in all right with everything down below sorted out last step is to add coolant there are a lot of coolants out on the market and again it's probably best to consult your owner's manual on which one you should get there's concentrated type there's also a 50/50 mix you can get whatever you like uh I like to use the concentrated because it comes in one bottle uh this car takes about two gallons of coolant so if I add one of these and then fill it back up with distilled water I filled my car properly all right so I'm going to add some distilled water now the only thing left to do at this point is run the engine you're going to have to repeat this cycle several times in order to get the coolant up to the level recommended it's going to need to cycle through the engine a little bit it's okay don't worry just don't rev your engine up all right that's it we're done remember to recycle all of your uh used coolant and please if you have any questions drop them in the comment section below we will very likely be able to get you hooked up with a Skype session to answer them [Music]

Channel: Car and Driver

Views: 2,498,238

Keywords: Saturday Mechanic, DIY, Do It Yourself, How To, Step-by-Step, guide, car, mechanic, how-to, cars, trucks, automotive, automobiles, direct, automobile, used, engine, Audi, A4, Audi A4, coolant, coolant flush, radiator, cooling, maintenance, repair, up-keep, saturday, fix, car maintenance, how, to, videos, car upgrades, Popular Mechanics, Ben Wojdyla, Detroit

Id: ZvtUOaj2jAI

Length: 7min 12sec (432 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 01 2012