Video: How to Check & Add Coolant

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Avoid checking and adding coolant to a car when the engine is hot. Learn when to check and add engine coolant with tips from an automotive service excellence (ASE)-certified master auto technician in this free video on automotive maintenance.

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Video Transcript

I'm Dave Erb from Dave's Ultimate Automotive in Austin, Texas and we're going to be talking about checking and adding coolant to your car. The first thing you need to know about checking your coolant is you don't want to check it hot. If the vehicle is hot it is going to be under pressure and if you open the cap while it is hot you are going to burn yourself and do yourself some damage. So you are always going to want to check the level when it is cold. We are talking about checking and adding your coolant. It is either going to be a remote reservoir that you will need to check. It will have a picture of a radiator on top or say coolant on top of it or it will actually be on the radiator itself, it will have a cap. When you are checking your fluid what you are looking for obviously is for it to be the proper level but you want to make sure that it is not contaminated, dirty or beyond its useful life. Over time it does tend to lose its rust inhibitor properties, protective properties and it will break down and it does need to be changed or flushed every 30,000 miles but to check the fluid if you are looking into a radiator you would simply while it was cold open the cap and make sure that it was to the top of the neck of the radiator. In this situation we have a remote reservoir and what we are looking for down here you can see a cold fill line which means you don't want to go above that. It wants to be there when it's cold. As the coolant heats up it will actually rise because of expansion so you don't want to over fill it. You want it up to that cold fill line so when it is cold, not warm you would remove the cap, take the coolant. There are all different kinds of coolants that go in vehicles these days, they have a regular coolant, an extended life coolant. They do make universal which is what I recommend keeping around. It will go in either one of them. There are different dyes, different colors that manufacturers use, universal ones will generally be green and they'll be o'kay to mix with all of them and you'd be good to go. You would simply just add the coolant until you got to the cold fill line and then put the cap back on and make sure that the cap is nice and tight and the seat is good. If it doesn't seat good you may end up with a leak so that would be checking and filling your coolant.

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How to Check & Add Coolant

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