How to Drain a Car's Coolant

Video Transcript

"Hi. I'm mark from expert village, and in this segment were going to cover draining the coolant. Now the coolant in automotive systems, there is a hazardous chemical, and it needs to be contained. If you have any spills you want to make sure you get them up real fast. You don't want to let this coolant get into a fresh water system, or drain off into your parking lot, or in any way make it into our sewer system. This is also extremely hazardous to pets. Animals like dogs and cats find this taste very appealing, but it's also very poisonous. So you don't want to leave pans lying around unattended that a dog or a cat might be able to get into because to them it's like candy. Drinking is very hazardous and poisonous. So you want to make sure when your draining the coolant system, you maintain it and get up all the spilled liquid. As we covered before in checking the coolant, part of the draining is you want to make sure there is no pressure on the system. You do so by releasing the cap. Cooling system pressure caps, to release them push down and that will release pressure and you might hear some bubbling or pressure escaping into the over flow bottle, then slowly twist. Once again if the vehicle is hot or been recently used, wait for it to cool down prior to removing the cap. After removing the cap to open the system, you want to find the drain cup to pick up the drain off the radiator, that?s located at the bottom of the radiator usually in the middle, sometimes on the end, but almost always on the bottom of the radiator. And it's just going to be a plastic cap. Most cases it just twists and that will open the valve that allows the coolant to drain out. We want to drain enough coolant in the system so it goes down below the level of the hose. So when we disconnect to replace the hose we don't loose coolant on the ground, waste the coolant. We keep it contained. And if the coolant is in good condition and reusable we can put it back in the system after we replace the hose. So at this time we can find the peck cart and drain the cooling system. In this vehicle it's located right in the middle. Three or four quick turns and the coolant starts rapidly draining out the bottom. As you notice were using the catch pan to contain the coolant in this system. Some of the things you might look for once you have it open and it's draining is check inside the radiator visually as its draining and you can see the cooling tubes. And look for corrosion built up in there because antifreeze becomes aesthetic as it circulates over aluminum. There's an electrolysis that happens and it becomes corrosive and starts building up corrosive deposits. Also lime and calcium from water can be found in cooling systems. Look for these deposits in there and that maybe an indication that it's time to do some service to the anti freeze. You can have it run through a recycling machine or just replace it all together. Watch our next segment on removing items. We'll discuss various items that may need to be removed to get accessibility to replace the hose."