What is coolant flush? A coolant flush involves draining old coolant from a vehicle’s cooling system, cleaning the system, and refilling it with fresh coolant. This process prevents overheating, rust, and corrosion, ensuring optimal engine performance and longevity. Regular coolant flushes, scheduled as recommended by your car’s manufacturer, are essential for maintaining the health of your vehicle’s engine and avoiding costly repairs.
A coolant flush or a radiator flush is no different from any other form of fluid maintenance on a vehicle. You can’t let the same fluid sit around in your car forever – while brake fluids, coolants, and motor oil generally aren’t designed to leak out of your car, meaning these liquids are continuously cycling through your vehicle, their condition still change throughout hundreds to thousands of hours of engine use. Coolant levels change over time as more and more of its water content is evaporated.
Topping off your engine’s coolant levels helps you minimize the risk of overheating, meaning better engine life and fuel efficiency. But every now and again, you will want to completely flush out your coolant to avoid running the risk of rust or corrosion. This article explores the importance of coolant flushes to keep your engine running smoothly and efficiently.
What is Coolant Flush?
A coolant flush involves draining your car of all its coolant and replacing it with new coolant. While engine coolants come with specialized, proprietary formulas, most coolants are simply a mixture of water and certain glycols found in antifreeze.
Engine coolants are available in different chemical compositions, such as IAT, OAT, HOAT, P-HOAT, and Si-OAT. IATs are coolants made with inorganic additive technology, common among older cars. Modern cars use some form of OAT, or organic acid technology.
Longevity is a primary reason for the change in coolant composition – while IAT coolants are more corrosion-resistant, OATs have a longer lifetime. HOATs, or hybrid coolants, enjoy the best of both worlds. You always want to pick the coolant that’s compatible with your engine – don’t mix and match.
Different coolants use not only different levels of water and glycols, but also different additives, which are crucial for maintaining the chemical balance needed for a coolant to interact properly with your engine’s own makeup, depending on the metal composition of your engine. Your car’s owner manual will tell you what kind of coolant you need.
Why a Coolant Flush is Necessary
Coolant is pumped throughout the engine while the car is running, absorbing some of the enormous amounts of heat generated by the engine’s many moving parts (e.g., the pistons), and redirecting that heat to the radiator, where it can be efficiently dissipated.
Coolants and air filters work together to keep engine temperatures stable, so the metal doesn’t warp, and you don’t get a blown head gasket.
Under normal conditions, coolants should be swapped in the intervals recommended by manufacturers. If you use your car more often or under more extreme conditions than most manufacturers suspect, then you will want to perform a coolant flush sooner rather than later.
Not performing a coolant flush means you’re risking your engine’s health, as well as your coolant system itself. Corrosion in the coolant system can cause coolant leaks, which can cause you to breakdown on the freeway with that characteristic white smoke billowing out from under your car’s hood.
How Often Should You Get a Coolant Flush?
Older cars should get a coolant flush every 60,000 miles, or every two to three years. Newer cars can hold out over 100,000 miles, because organic coolants tend to last much longer – but it’s still recommended to get a coolant flush on a newer car every five years, even if you haven’t quite hit the respective mile total.
For more accurate numbers, check with your car’s manual or manufacturer. Every make and model runs on its own clock when it comes to vehicle maintenance.
You usually won’t notice that you need a coolant flush until it’s too late. Topping off your coolant fluid can help keep your car’s temperature under control, but failing to regularly clean out the coolant system might leave you at risk for a coolant leak or some other form of coolant system failure due to debris or corrosion.
Steps Involved in a Coolant Flush
Whether you’re doing your own coolant flush or scheduling one at a professional auto shop, the process itself is simple on paper: get your car level, make sure the engine is cold and the keys are out of the ignition, and start by draining the coolant out of your engine and radiator. Then flush the cooling system out with a specialized flushing system and fill the system back up with new coolant. Here’s a more detailed step-by-step process:
- Start with the car level and cool. Do not flush our coolant while your car is still hot – the coolant will be hot, as well, as you may burn yourself.
- Take the radiator cap off the radiator, and unscrew the radiator drain plug under the car – be sure to prepare a funnel and a bucket for this step, because this is where most of the fluid will be drained out of the system.
- The next step is the flush itself. Depending on the cooling system’s state, use distilled or distilled water mixed with a flushing solution to remove corrosion.
- For the flush, fill the system with water or cleaning solution and let the engine run for ten minutes or so. Then drain it again. Rinse and repeat until the water leaving the cooling system is about as clear as when you put it in. During the last flush, get as much water out of the system as possible.
- Once the system has been thoroughly flushed, it’s time to replace it with the new coolant.
Coolant Flush Services at Blu Automotive
Coolant flushes aren’t usually something you would do yourself because the goal is not just to replace the coolant but also to clean out the entire coolant system of all sediments, corrosion, and debris before introducing a fresh coolant. If you are attempting a DIY coolant flush for the first time, consider taking your car to an auto shop such as Blu Automotive and observing how they work so you can take notes on what to do.
