Flushing and refilling coolant

Question for Hyundaitech, or anyone else who knows the answer....

How do you go about draining ALL of the coolant from an '06 Sonata? The owners manual and the online service manual say open the radiator drain, and let her rip. That gets you only a little over 2 quarts from a system that's supposed to be a little over 2 gallons. I wound up having to flush it multiple times with distilled water until no more green was left.

The answer to the first question to me is: Because the jug that has blue liquid in it, and says "removes bugs" doesn't go in that hole. This was after I was told the windshield washer didn't work even though it's full. Who knows how much made it into the cooling system, or if it would hurt anything - Methanol and aluminum don't play nice together, and who knows what the elevated temps would do - but there's none in there now.

Reply to
Bob
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To my knowledge, Hyundai doesn't have any block drains. My only suggestion would be to pull the thermostat and install a garden hose. But it sounds like you've done an even better job than that.

Reply to
hyundaitech

why in the world would you flush coolant in a 2006 MY vehicle?

Reply to
misterh78

If you read the entire post, you would have seen that he had an "ooops" when adding washer fluid.

Reply to
Edwin Pawlowski

Actually, I didn't have the "oops"... The washer was reported to be non-functional even though it was "filled" a few days prior. I tried flushing it according to the manual because several drive cycles occurred between the "filling", and I had no idea how much was sucked into the cooling system, and I have no desire to find out how well washer fluid mixes work in aluminum engines on a long term basis. The interesting discovery here is that the manuals are (both the owner's and the online service manual) are DEAD WRONG when it comes to the procedure for flushing the cooling system.

Short of yanking the thermostat (as Hyundaitech suggested), and sucking out the contents of the cooling system , and heater core out with a wet-dry vac, the only way I could see to do it was to drain the radiator, and refill it with distilled water. I left the top hose off, kept the radiator full, and allowed water that made it through after the thermostat opened with the engine running and the heat on to drain into a clean garbage can. After no green was in the output water, I fed the system about a gallon and a 1/2 of new coolant. After a couple of days, I diluted the system down a little to get the mix to about 60% based on a hydrometer. After all the fun and games, I filled the water jugs, and the anti freeze bottle with the diluted former system contents. I've found that used auto parts yards take non-contaminated antifreeze for free. They sell it to recyclers. They didn't care that it was watered down.

Hyundaitech.... Maybe you can bring it to someone's attention that the recommended procedure doesn't work. I can't imagine a pro going through all this trouble.

Reply to
Bob

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