I would like to do a drain and fill on my 07 corolla. Does anybody know if this a straight forward job or is it one of those hard to bleed systems?
Is this needed by the manual. I think Toyota uses the long life pink coolant, due to change at 120K miles or 60 months. Are you there yet?
I have changed many of these and the only time I had trouble bleeding the system was a Renault Le Car in the 70’s.
Shouldn’t be too difficult. But not really sure. As for that long life coolant…I’d still change it…Cheap insurance if you ask me.
The WORSE vehicle I ever did was my 73 Vega. Radiator didn’t have a pitcock. To drain the radiator you had to remove the bottom hose. Don’t do it when it’s hot.
It is easy to do. If I recall correctly, it does have a bleed port but its a piece of cake to do.
You should have the long life coolant in your system and if so, you can wait to do this later, but if you decide to do it now, you can get by with just draining the radiator.
The goal of the drain and refill is to renew the corrosion protection package. Just draining the radiator does not get all the old coolant out, but if done more frequently, you can keep up the corrosion protection to a sufficient level. The remaining “contaminants” will not hurt the system, they are just used up corrosion protection chemicals. They won’t harm but they won’t help either.
You can help this a little more by mixing full strength antifreeze with distilled water at a 2:1 ratio instead of buying a 50:50 premix. You will need an empty container to do this. This will add a little more corrosion protection as well as raising your boil over point and lowering your freeze point.
Keeping up with your coolant replacement schedule and doing a simple drain and refill will give your cooling system a very long, trouble free life. You will never have to do a flush, which I consider detrimental to the system anyway.
I recently changed the coolant in my 2006 Matrix, which is essentially the same car.
The simplest thing to do is get a gallon of the Toyota ‘Super Long Life’ coolant.
It’s a bright fluorescent pink color, already diluted 50:50.
The radiator drain is on the left (drivers) side of the radiator. Easy to reach from above.
With the engine COLD remove the radiator cap and open the radiator drain.
A little under a gallon should drain out. Close the drain.
I used a flexible hose to empty the reservoir.
Refill the reservoir to the top line then slowly pour new coolant into the radiator. I used a funnel.
You’ll probably have a quart or more of coolant left in the jug when the radiator seems full.
Squeeze the top radiator hose and you’ll get some bubbles and the level will go down in the radiator.
Pour in more. Repeat.
Replace the cap and warm up the engine (I did this on a regular drive).
When the engine is cold again top off the radiator and the reservoir.
Repeat until the reservoir level stops dropping.
(This editing window sucks!)
Thanks to all who replied.