flushed the coolant, now what?

4.6Rob

New Member
Jul 23, 2009
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i flushed out my coolant tonight and it took me seriosly an hour to get clear water to come out the drain ****. Took it for a drive,came home and went to top it off and it looks just as dirty as it did before. The car has been sitting since last winter and who knows when/if the PO ever changed the the coolant. I know there is tons of more crap in it, my resivor is still covered in rust colored resedue. Am i just going to have to roll with it for a little bit and keep flushing or is there a more effective way to getting it all out? I personaly have never seen antifreeze this dirty....
 
in total, theres about 14 quarts of coolant in your system. some in your overflow tank, some in your radiator, and the rest in the block itself. theres a lot of fluid, are you sue you got it all out?
 
There are coolant drain plugs (1 each side) to be opened about 1" above the oil pan rail. You have to drain the RAD, the "Burp Bottle" and the block to really get it all out.

Remove the burp bottle and use a small amount of cat litter w/ water shaken briskly in the burp bottle will get rid of the rusty residue in the tank. Make sure you flush the tank VERY well to remove ALL of the cat litter.

You can always have it professionally flushed too.

GT
 
I've heard of people having success with those namebrand flush kits. where you could leave the kit running with the engine running and flush it in 10 min. But with the EPA and all now, I'm not even sure if you can buy those kits.
 
Take it to a shop and have it flushed with a coolant exchanger, it takes it all out and puts new back in it's place. It should be well under $100 to have that done.

Back in 05 when I was an apprentice at a lincoln mercury shop, I did a coolant flush (pretty sure it was a taurus) on a car with the same dirty coolant / water. I cant tell you how much water I flushed through it; gallons upon gallons. I was able to get it way better than it was, but not 100%.
 
Back in 05 when I was an apprentice at a lincoln mercury shop, I did a coolant flush (pretty sure it was a taurus) on a car with the same dirty coolant / water. I cant tell you how much water I flushed through it; gallons upon gallons. I was able to get it way better than it was, but not 100%.

Sure if it is really dirty it will take a while to get it clean, but it is really the only way to get all the old coolant out and start fresh. The key is to not wait so long to get the coolant changed out.