How to Drain Fill and Bleed Coolant 2000-07 Toyota Highlander Cooling System

Hi, I’m Mike from 1A Auto. We’ve been selling auto parts for over 30 years!

Raise and support your vehicle or you could do this on the ground. This vehicle is a bit higher. You need to remove this lower panel. If yours is completely intact, you'll have eight 10 millimeter bolts around the outer edge. Up here, this bumper is broken. So these are loose. That one's broken off there. There is a push clip on either side. This one is missing. But it would look just like this one here. I'm going to start by removing the bolts. Spray a little rust penetrant in here. Use a 10 millimeter socket extension and ratchet and just go along and remove all these bolts.

This one was still connected. You can unbolt it here. It's broken apart. I'm not going to worry about it. The bumper is broken. But the bolt is there. So I'll remove that bolt. This bolt here, same thing. Bumper's broken. But the bolt is still there holding on this front shield. Just the clip is holding the shield on now. Pop the clip out with a flat bladed screwdriver to unlock it. Sometimes, these break. This one looks kind of brittle and discolored. It might break. If it breaks, just replace it with a new one.

Place our drain pan underneath the vehicle to catch the coolant, then it can either be reused if it's nice and clean or disposed of properly. Then you can remove the radiator drain. It's this white plug right here. Open it up. You don't have to take it all the way out. You can just kind of unscrew it and it'll start to drain. It's got a little nozzle on the bottom, and then what you can do once it starts to drain, of course you're doing this when the vehicle is nice and cool, you can open up the radiator cap. It'll come out faster.

If you drain the radiator, you can close this back up. We're going to fill and bleed the cooling system. We're using a coolant funnel for the appropriate 50/50 mixture of water and coolant the vehicle calls for. You don't need a funnel like this. It does make it easier. It certainly makes it easier for us to show you what's happening. But we're going to run the car with it filled with coolant.

The cap, of course, is not on here. This allows the car when it warms up and the thermostat opens for any air bubbles that are trapped inside there to come out through this funnel and then be replaced by this extra coolant. You can simply do that by just filling the radiator up to the top and then running the car with the cap off. It might get a little messy. But it will work in your driveway.

At the same time, I'll turn the heat to hot. I won't turn the fan motor on because I want the car to get warm enough and have the thermostat open up. But I do want coolant circulating through the heater core so that we eliminate any bubbles that may be in there. We're going to remove our funnel. This coolant is hot. So I'm going to be careful. If you need to, you can use this to top off your overflow reservoir.

If not, I'll put it back in the bottle and reuse it. We're going to remove our funnel piece here, little adaptor. The radiator's filled up right to the top and I'll reinstall the radiator cap. Put the shield back in place underneath the bumper. Some of these clips are broken. This does line up over here. The push clip that's not broken—I'll put it in. This will be the same for the other side except ours is broken and missing. But this will go underneath.

We'll put this 10 millimeter bolt back up in place, capturing these two shields. If ours wasn't broken, this bolt would go through and up and into it. There's one more here. But ours broke. It's rusty. It's not a big deal. It's held in with enough clips and bolts.

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