I own a Ford Fusion 2014 Ecoboost 2.0L. I am new to car maintenance, please be kind with my lack of experience. Also do not get me wrong by what I say below I am thrilled this guy made a video to help show things. I think its great and amazing to get help and see how things are done.
In this video he shows how to flush coolant. It is not very detailed however. I am curious as to what he did with the other hose he detached from the reservoir. Did he cap it off or something? Also he isn’t showing the whole start to finish. When do you do the filling? Do you just add fluid in the pressure cap hole? Did he make any changes to those hoses he disconnected? Looks like he detached the one hose on the top there and then did what with the other end of it? Then he detached the end of the hose for the vent line at the top of the radiator where it runs to and then draped it over to drain in the bucket. Wish he went into the procedure in way more detail and explained all those lines and what is happening exactly. If anyone knows about this procedure can you explain in some nice detail for us all? Thanks in advance. Van.
For the least amount of problems, just drain all the coolant you can and refill with a 50/50 premix or make your own with concentrate and distilled water at a 50/50 or slightly richer mix. You won’t contaminate the system this way.
Thanks for the info Keith. I knew to do a refill with the right coolant but still am not sure about the hose setup he is doing there in that video and would like to know more about the closed system. Also if you drain too much fluid while the engine is hot and running like he is doing there won’t you blow a head gasket or cause similar damages? It seems like a weird little juggle he is doing there.
Yeah, I would not recommend what he is doing. You could do a lot of damage and he is not getting out very much of his old coolant. What he is trying to mimic is the flush system where you disconnect one of the heater hoses and let the water pump push the coolant into a recycle machine and fresh coolant is pumped by the machine into the coolant reservoir.
You need a little history here. Many years ago, radiators had a cap but no overflow reservoir. You had to leave an air gap at the top of the radiator or the coolant would just pump out the relief valve in the cap. One problem with this system is that the turbulence caused by the coolant being pumped into the top tank caused air to mix with the coolant. This reduced the coolant effectiveness. Overheating on road trips was very common in those days.
The reservoir tank came out in the mid 60’s and basically, you filled the radiator all the way to the top, eliminating any air and when the coolant heated up and expanded, it would go into the overflow reservoir. When the coolant cooled down after a run, the vacuum created by the shrinking antifreeze would draw the coolant back into the radiator. This eliminated the problem with air getting into the coolant and increases it’s effectiveness.
The new system uses a radiator without a cap and a remote reservoir. It is not really an overflow tank anymore but a part of the upper radiator tank. Because it is remotely located, there is almost no turbulence in the reservoir so air does not get into the coolant system. This new system works just as good, maybe even a little better than the overflow design but has fewer parts count and is simpler in its operation, and more reliable.