Thread: D3 grunge in the coolant bottle

These are such a pain in the arse to clean out, even more with the rear core. My most hated job.

Originally Posted by josh.huber

Should be about $40 from memory.

$70. I think they saw me coming. Now I just need to get some time.

Originally Posted by BradC

$70. I think they saw me coming. Now I just need to get some time.

Whatever you do.. Drive the thing. I've seen people do coolant flush in the driveway.. It never works.. Fill it up with fresh water and the Cummins stuff, fill some bottles of water to take in the car as a just in case & a garden hose. And off you go.. Highway.. you want the thermostats opening. Not the engine getting hot. Flush isn't coolant and will boil at a lower temp. With a good Cap I think around the 114 degrees Mark. I've left it in way longer and never had a drama..

Also what you want to do is push the **** out the top.. Not drain it. When you drain it. It sticks to the walls as the level drops. A tape a peice of beer line or airline to the garden hose and over full the system so it floats out the top.

You can also loosen the top hose off and force the water through the header tank to get it out. The Cummins stuff is pretty good at mixing the oil into the water and draining. But. It never hurts to try.

Originally Posted by josh.huber

Whatever you do.. Drive the thing. I've seen people do coolant flush in the driveway.. It never works.. Fill it up with fresh water and the Cummins stuff, fill some bottles of water to take in the car as a just in case & a garden hose. And off you go.. Highway.. you want the thermostats opening. Not the engine getting hot. Flush isn't coolant and will boil at a lower temp. With a good Cap I think around the 114 degrees Mark. I've left it in way longer and never had a drama..

Also what you want to do is push the **** out the top.. Not drain it. When you drain it. It sticks to the walls as the level drops. A tape a peice of beer line or airline to the garden hose and over full the system so it floats out the top.

You can also loosen the top hose off and force the water through the header tank to get it out. The Cummins stuff is pretty good at mixing the oil into the water and draining. But. It never hurts to try.

I have a fuel burning heater which sits between the top EGR cooler hoses and the heater matrix. I've got a pair of 19mm hose nipples and my plan was to put the garden hose in the line *to* the heater matrix, which will then push everything through the block, and out the EGR cooler outlets. While that's happening I can partially crimp the dump line and push the remainder out the top of the reservoir while rotating other hoses off to make sure I get as much out as possible (bottom fuel cooler for example).

I flushed this thing 3 times last service with DI water before I did the coolant change, but obviously a conventional drop/fill/bleed/drive to temp/cool/rinse/repeat didn't work last time so I figure I might as well try something else.

I'm tossing up whether to replace the coolant bottle before I drop the new coolant in. It's not that old, but it's pretty grungy. Suppose I'll see if the flush takes any of that out before I drop $160 on a new one.

This procedure has been _so_ simple on every other car I've done it on, the bloody Discovery just has to be *that* much harder.

Originally Posted by BradC

I have a fuel burning heater which sits between the top EGR cooler hoses and the heater matrix. I've got a pair of 19mm hose nipples and my plan was to put the garden hose in the line *to* the heater matrix, which will then push everything through the block, and out the EGR cooler outlets. While that's happening I can partially crimp the dump line and push the remainder out the top of the reservoir while rotating other hoses off to make sure I get as much out as possible (bottom fuel cooler for example).

I flushed this thing 3 times last service with DI water before I did the coolant change, but obviously a conventional drop/fill/bleed/drive to temp/cool/rinse/repeat didn't work last time so I figure I might as well try something else.

I'm tossing up whether to replace the coolant bottle before I drop the new coolant in. It's not that old, but it's pretty grungy. Suppose I'll see if the flush takes any of that out before I drop $160 on a new one.

This procedure has been _so_ simple on every other car I've done it on, the bloody Discovery just has to be *that* much harder.

Our second car is a pristine little Nissan pulsar. 2001 I think. It did a radiator last week. Even on such a small car, the flushing process takes ages to get everything out. Until you find a nice lower block drain and remove the thermostat.. my preference is to separate the system, do the radiator side and the heater side, while cold.

For filling I leave a few lines off and put trays underneath so it pushes the water out as it fills. Once the coolant is dark red. I put the hose back on.

I would use your method first till it's clean.. Then do it with the engine running to finish the job. Won't take long at all.

The water doesn't have to be super clean to flush. But getting the flush out is a bitch. I usually taste test it.

With the bottle.. That'll be interesting.. They normally clean out nice.. But I've got no idea what the effect on the float will be.

Day 1 done.

In Feb when I last serviced the car I flushed it twice with distilled water and put 5L of Penrite Blue coolant concentrate in. It was *blue*. What I dropped today was light orange, like the original OAT coolant that was in it when I bought it. Not a trace of blue. Not a trace of oil either, so there's that.

I gave it a good flush, then added 1L of Cummins restore with 10L of distilled water. Then I cleaned up and took it for a 160km 2 hour drive. Lots of change up, plenty of high speed, a few good hills. A nice mix of load. This came out. Looked like a mix between orange juice and strawberry milk:


I noticed that I still had no heat on the passenger side, so while the engine was cooling down I isolated the heater core and knocked up a "power flush thingo".
A tee, and an input for the garden hose and the air compressor. I tried many different approaches to flushing the core and the one I had the best success with was blow it all clear, release a "slug" of water into the pipework and then hit it with the compressed air. That seemed to slam it through the core and loosened lots of grunge. I probably spent an hour attacking this from both directions until I had no more foam, and no more pink sludge.



I then set the flusher up on the engine :
I used the compressed air to get as much flush out as possible, undoing various hoses underneath until nothing more came out. As the engine was still a bit warm I just let it trickle water in until it started to come out of the top of the coolant bottle, then ramped up the flow. This was about 2 hours of flush, drain, flush, drain, engine on, and lots of running at various speeds until there was no sign of flush in the discharge. The coolant bottle needed lots of flushing and compressed air. After 2 hours and a couple of hundred litres of water I could not spot, test or taste a trace of flush. Blew it out again to remove as much water as possible.


Then a fill with distilled water. Hooray for an E-bay $99 coolant vacuum fill kit.
I must have got pretty much *all* the coolant out as the specs say 10.35L and it took just shy of 11L. (spec is EU3 and this is an EU4).



Took it for a drive to get the thermostat open and have searing heat on the passenger side, so the matrix is clear (enough anyway). Result.
Got home, popped the cap to be greeted with a coolant bottle full of fine foam, so there was obviously still a pocket of flush I missed.

I had planned to drop the DI water in the morning and put the coolant in, but I might do another DI flush first and see if I can lose the foam.

I still want to know where the blue went? I'm off to E-mail Penrite.

Originally Posted by BradC

Day 1 done.

In Feb when I last serviced the car I flushed it twice with distilled water and put 5L of Penrite Blue coolant concentrate in. It was *blue*. What I dropped today was light orange, like the original OAT coolant that was in it when I bought it. Not a trace of blue. Not a trace of oil either, so there's that.

I gave it a good flush, then added 1L of Cummins restore with 10L of distilled water. Then I cleaned up and took it for a 160km 2 hour drive. Lots of change up, plenty of high speed, a few good hills. A nice mix of load. This came out. Looked like a mix between orange juice and strawberry milk:


I noticed that I still had no heat on the passenger side, so while the engine was cooling down I isolated the heater core and knocked up a "power flush thingo".
A tee, and an input for the garden hose and the air compressor. I tried many different approaches to flushing the core and the one I had the best success with was blow it all clear, release a "slug" of water into the pipework and then hit it with the compressed air. That seemed to slam it through the core and loosened lots of grunge. I probably spent an hour attacking this from both directions until I had no more foam, and no more pink sludge.



I then set the flusher up on the engine :
I used the compressed air to get as much flush out as possible, undoing various hoses underneath until nothing more came out. As the engine was still a bit warm I just let it trickle water in until it started to come out of the top of the coolant bottle, then ramped up the flow. This was about 2 hours of flush, drain, flush, drain, engine on, and lots of running at various speeds until there was no sign of flush in the discharge. The coolant bottle needed lots of flushing and compressed air. After 2 hours and a couple of hundred litres of water I could not spot, test or taste a trace of flush. Blew it out again to remove as much water as possible.


Then a fill with distilled water. Hooray for an E-bay $99 coolant vacuum fill kit.
I must have got pretty much *all* the coolant out as the specs say 10.35L and it took just shy of 11L. (spec is EU3 and this is an EU4).



Took it for a drive to get the thermostat open and have searing heat on the passenger side, so the matrix is clear (enough anyway). Result.
Got home, popped the cap to be greeted with a coolant bottle full of fine foam, so there was obviously still a pocket of flush I missed.

I had planned to drop the DI water in the morning and put the coolant in, but I might do another DI flush first and see if I can lose the foam.

I still want to know where the blue went? I'm off to E-mail Penrite.

Must have really had some **** in it for that flush not to get it out in that drive.. did you have the heaters on for the drive.

To save money.. You don't need to use demin water for flushing,

What coolant are you going to run when your finished?

How does the bottle look? To get the bubbles out you can add a garden hose to the bottom of the radiator and float it out.

It almost sounds like, now you have unblocked the heater it may need a second application, to go through and finish dissolving everything.

I would probably just fill it with coolant, nulon long life red is usually the cheapest and monitor it over summer.

Do it again next lock down, I mean winter

Glad to hear for your sake it wasn't oil..