I have been reading about the green vs orange coolant and I am getting a headache. My question here is by brother happen to due a coolant change on a monte carlo that I sold him and he changed it from orange to green when i went to change the coolant my self I flush it and put green also but as I was doing that I read use the organe. My question here is should I go back to the orange coolant. or should I stay with the green. The reason that I ask is because on one of the forum it say that there is really no way to flush the system complete.
First of all, it is total BULLSHIT that you cannot flush the system well enough to change the coolant. Whoever said that is a total idiot. Like everything else, there is a proper way to do things, and a totally wrong way to do things, and all else in between.
Second, the orange OAT type coolant, or Dexcool, is not necessarily the best product that ever hit the shelves, and has not lived up to hype in many cases. If you are trying to keep a warranty intact, then use it, and change it every two years or so.
The traditional green coolant is a very good formulation for most applications. It has been used for years with few and rare problems. Alloys in cars havent changed a lot in years. Water is water, for the most part. So read between the lines. If you use green coolant, it is still wise to flush your system and replace the coolant every two years or so.
It is really cheap to maintain a cooling system, and dumb to let one go to rot on you.
The self proclaimed engineers here are totally misinformed. Materials in cars have changed considerably over the years. If your car calls for dexcool use it as that is the chemical base the car is designed for. Color doesn't matter it is the chemical makeup that does and the car engineers know more about what it than the "engineers" here.
This is common misconception about many things that comes up periodically. The engine was not designed for the chemical base of anything. The engine was designed to perform - period. The coolant choice was later made based on other factors, but the engine was not designed for Dex-Cool, or anything else. It is somewhat head-in-the-sand-ish to default to the idea that the designers know more than anyone else on matters like this.
Thanks, Mike. The engineers never made this decision in the first place. Engines and their auxiliary systems still use more or less the same types of metallurgy they always did. Cast iron, aluminum, brass, lead solder, and occasionally some bits of 'pot' metal or zinc castings.
The coolants and additive packages came about in a secondary manner.
I am sure you remember the really lousy aluminum-silicon castings made by GM a number of years ago. Mercedes Benz still uses aluminum silicon technology, although the development of the metallurgy is much better now.
Companies like GM often adopt a proprietary system like Dex Cool. It is sometimes for marketing reasons as much as for technical and reliability reasons.
My, perhaps blunt, comment was that it is not a big trick to flush out a cooling system so that you can put whatever you want back in it. And I stick with that. You can get the system as clean as you need it to be.
And you can choose what you wish to put in it, but it is wise not to mix systems if the formulator says not to do so.
There have been so many complaints against DexCool that I would not feel hesitant to replace it with HOAT technology or even the old green juice.
As I mentioned much earlier, we have purchased the packages which go into Dex Cool, blended it with glycols, and used them in commercial systems because the customer wanted the environmental benefits of the OAT. In these systems, it was a somewhat inferior system, definitely not a longer term or superior solution.
HOAT is reputedly better.
Apparently I stepped on the sensitivities of Woody, but I dont retreat very much from what I have posted.
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