How to Drain Fill and Bleed Radiator 2005-11 Honda Civic
Created on: 2017-12-06
Learn how to properly drain, fill, and bleed the coolant with these steps from our experts
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step 1 :Draining the Radiator
- Open the hood and secure it with the prop rod
- Raise and support the vehicle
- Have a drain bucket ready
- Open the radiator drain plug
- Let the coolant drain
- Tighten the radiator drain plug
- Clean off the area
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step 2 :Filling and Bleeding the Radiator
- Insert a funnel into the radiator
- Fill the vehicle with the appropriate coolant until it's topped off
- Start the vehicle
- Let the air bubbles escape in the funnel
- Watch the coolant level
- If the level dips, turn off the vehicle and refill the coolant
- Wait until the system is bled
- Place the radiator cap on
- Start the vehicle
Tools needed
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Funnel
Paper Towels
Jack Stands
Drain Pan
Floor Jack
Needle nose pliers
Hi, I’m Mike from 1A Auto. We’ve been selling auto parts for over 30 years!
Open up the hood. Pull the release. There are two spots you can put the prop rod. There's one here. That's sort of the normal one. If you need to work on the engine and you don't want to be hitting your head, you can actually lift the hood up further and push the prop rod down into this opening here. It puts the hood almost vertically, gives you a lot more space to work.
You'll have to raise and support the vehicle, so you can at least get to the drain at the front of the vehicle. At minimum, you want to raise the front, but we're going to use our two-post lift. The radiator drain is located right here. There's a nice opening in this plastic shield. If this is too tight to take off with your fingers, you can use a pair of pliers to loosen it. Just make sure that when you loosen it, you've got your drain pan or bucket ready because it will come pouring out. I'm just going to get it free with my pliers. I can finish taking it off with my hand.
If you go up top and you open the radiator cap it will drain even faster. With this drained, I will reinstall the plug. Don't forget to do this before you refill the radiator with coolant. Get it threaded in place. Just use your hand to tighten it, because you don't want to over-tighten it. That feels good there. Wipe up any coolant.
Now you're ready to refill the radiator and bleed the system. We've got a special radiator funnel set up. This will help us fill and bleed the system. We're going to fill it with a 50/50 mix of the appropriate coolant. We've got this topped off. Now I've just kind of gone in and just squeezed the upper and lower radiator hoses a little bit. Gets any real big air bubbles out of there.
I'm going to start it and run it, let the thermostat open, and we should see any bubbles that are remaining in the system bubble out of the funnel. You can see as the engine's running any air bubbles in the cooling system are staring to escape. When it comes up to temperature and the thermostat opens, we should see a lot more air bubbles come out. Our system is bled.
The lower hose is warm, so the thermostat is open. I'm going to shut the car off. This coolant's really hot. We're going to put our little plug in here so we can take our funnel out. I'll actually take the extra, because our reservoir's a little empty. Put that in here. Don't want to overfill it. Just fill it to the high mark. Move the rest of our funnel. Coolant's right at the top of the radiator, which is perfect. Reinstall the radiator cap. Wipe up any spilled coolant. Job is complete.
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