My 2018 Lariat 5.0 has a little over 117,000 miles was going through the schedule maintenance noticed it was due for a coolant flush. I’m not experiencing any issues with it “knock on wood” but just wondered y’all’s thoughts on flushing then adding 290 gold coolant.

 

Might as well do it. I'm slowly changing out my fluids. I'm slacking because I'm having a bit of trouble affording much of anything.

 

Agreed. I'm slowly replacing all my fluids as well since I just crossed over the magic 100k number. Not having any issues but I plan on keeping this truck forever

 

Don’t use gold coolant. Ford hasn’t used that in these trucks for years. You want the current yellow coolant which is fully compatible with the likely orange you have in there now.

 

Ok… it does have orange in it right now. For whatever reason the manual is calling gold.

 

The updated coolant is yellow VC-13GL-D and is backwards compatible with your current coolant. Unless you have access to a machine, it’s nearly impossible to get all of the coolant out. I chose to drain and vacuum refill every few months to slowly cycle out the orange. You get about a gallon out by doing a simple radiator drain from the petcock.

 

Recently did my 18 5.0, Ford yellow is correct. I flushed, or rather diluted the orange with repeated drain and refill with distilled water. Cheap enough. Used 4 gallons. Since I was doing a waterpump, thermostat and y pipe, drained out enough to mix back concentrate, apologies thinking close to 2 gallons, came out close checking with refractor. The heater core is a bear to refill, you will read about uphill slant, and others. Also recently replaced the transmission cooler with a front mount and thermal valve. No results on that yet. But during that I found an auxiliary water pump in the heater circuit. It is there to maintain circulation to the heater while stop start has the engine shut off.
maybe try this and see how it works. Drive it to full temperature stop to let the pump run a few minutes, see if heat comes back with controls set to high heat. If tried, let us know.

 

I’m gonna order some coolant from rock auto and soon as I get a chance I’ll get to changing it out. Thank y’all for the helpful advice and soon as I get it all done I’ll update to let everyone know how it all went.

 

Do this but refill with distilled water until it is basically clear when drained. Then add PURE yellow coolant - not premix. should result in about a 50/50 mix.

I pulled the turbo coolant lines when I changed mine so I basically got all of it at one time. There is A LOT of coolant still back in that area of the engine after draining.