I'm about to replace my water pump and want to re-use the antifreeze (its been leaking an has gotten a lot of new fluid as of late.. and its not cheap). Anyone have any tricks for saving the fluid? Last time I opened the radiator drain I seem to recall that the fluid streamed all over some suspension components and ended up dirty.

I'm thinking I should be able to screw a little spigot into the drain hole... wondering if anyone has done this... and might know what size spigot I need? or have an alternate approach.

thx
Dave

 

this is never a good idea to reuse any kind of car fluid/oil, once it came out and there is a high chance of contamination with other dirty partials.

you really dont want to save a buck today and costing you a fortune tomorrow for repair.

I use Jaguar OEM antifreeze and that was not that expensive to find on web.

my personal opinion.

 

I have found that removing the black panel under the bumper makes it easier to drain the coolant out with less confusion. it spills out of there too fast in my view to do anything too fancy but my system has been to have 2 large aluminum pans, alternating them when they get full as I drain the coolant out. I then funnel the coolant into old washer fluid bottles. This is not a very good system, I estimate that I can only effectively recover 80% of what I drain for reuse.

The coolant definitely does go all over some of the suspension, I just figure it is fine and doesn't really matter.

If my coolant was old I wouldn't reuse it, but my coolant that I drained out a few weeks ago only has about 5,000 miles of use on it.

 

buy no coolant, don't reuse...it is not worth it...do capture it to dispose of it properly though :-)

 

Just make sure you use the proper coolant. There was a change around 2000 I believe. Mine has always had the orange (Dexcool) in it. Mixing the orange and the green coolants is a big no-no.