I have been hearing a lot about doing coolant flush's and Oil coolers and whatnot, and I was just wondering how often should you have a coolant flush done? It should be an actual FLUSH right, not just a d"rain and fill"?

Also, whats the "Gold" coolant?

 

its a ford gold premium coolant. it was designed for use on the 6.0

there is a flush procedure in our tech folders if u wanna DIY.

dont use any other color coolant. the "gold" coolant can be bought from ford dealerships, or u can use the zerex g-05 coolant in the 6.0. ford recommends the gold coolant and the zerex coolant.

 

I wouldn't say the ford gold was designed for the 6.0 since IH uses ELC in their motors, but rather that it was an economic choice by Ford since they had it readily available at the time. My daughter's escape uses the same thing. This, however, has been argued to death and is for another day. That being said, there seems to be no rhyme or reason as to why some have oil cooler plugging (and run a coolant filter) and some don't (and don't run a filter).

 

You're exactly right, and unfortunately this is a pretty common practice in the industry, i.e. just calling a readily available part/liquid 'good enough' and rolling it out to the public as being "designed for it" and the "recommended" whatever, when in reality it's just the cheapest option and saved countless $$$...

 

I wonder how many warranty oil coolers it took to eat up the $$$ that they "saved"???

 

So in the interest of getting the most life out of the cooler, should I go with the gold, or does it really matter? Based on what you guys are saying, it doesnt seem to matter either way...almost like "dam if you do, dam if you dont"

 

Hindsight, you know. I bet they regret it now.

 

@ npccpartsman, ur right brother.

@genelaw1, go ahead wif ur flush. jus remember to use the ford gold coolant, or zerex g-05, or the CAT ec-1 elc coolant. either one of these should do fine in ur ford.

 

The 6.0 is known to blow head gaskets. This is why it happens. The Ford Gold coolant contains silicates. The silicates are not able to handle high EGT's generated by a good load or relatively high boost when run through the EGR cooler. They break down into a jell like sludge and fall out of suspension. This crud gets caught up in the tiny coolant passageways of the oil cooler. As the cooler clogs up it restricts coolant flow to the egr cooler. Now the egr cooler doesn't have enough coolant to carry off the heat generated by high EGT's. The limited amount of coolant in the egr cooler flash boils causing high pressure in the cooling system and the truck pukes coolant from the degas bottle due to the pressure. (it has to go somewhere)
Your uninformed Powerstroke owner is not monitoring his coolant temps and oil temps so he doesn't know whats going on and he keeps driving it this way. The problem get worse, the pressure causes the egr cooler to rupture. Now the egr cooler is leaking coolant into the intake manifold which then runs into the cylinders. Again the high combustion temps cause the coolant to vaporize. This causes unacceptably high cylinder pressure, the TTY head bolts stretch due to the additional pressure and there go your head gaskets.

Ok now you know the problem. Here's the cure. Get a good engine monitoring solution like the Edge Insight so that you can monitor your ECT and EOT. If those temps get more than 15* apart at normal cruising when at normal operating temperature your oil cooler is clogging up. Rebuild it now to prevent all that down stream damage from occurring. Flush that Ford Gold coolant cxxp out of your engine with a couple bottles of Restore. This is made specifically to clean out that silicate residue. Now refill it with a silicate free Cat EC-1 rated ELC coolant. This removes the silicates that clog the oil cooler from the equation. If you live in an area where you don't have smog inspections delete the egr system. If you can't delete it replace the egr cooler with the cooler manufactured by Bulletproof Diesel. This is vastly superior to the Ford oem egr cooler and it will not fail on you. If you find that you need to replace head gaskets replace the TTY head bolts with ARP studs and Ford head gaskets. If you have to replace the egr cooler always replace the oil cooler. That is the source of the problem.
pop

 

What you want to do is flsuh your cooling system every 50,000 miles with distilled water (buy at grocery store or Walmart). You want 16 - 20 gallons.

Buy the Ford Premium Gold coolant at local dealer (I do). By changing it every 50,000 miles you will not have to worry about it.

1) Warm up motor by driving until temp gauge comes up to normal but not too much as you need to open the degas bottle cap when done (will be slightly pressurized).

2) Drop lower radiator hose and let drain (be careful, it will be hot).

3) Reattach hose and refill degas bottle with distilled water (4 gallons I think).

4) Let idle with heater on and let air bubbles move through system.

5) Drive truck until temp gauge comes back to normal.

Repeat steps #1 - #5 until coolant coming out is plain distilled water (do probably 4 times or so which is 16 gallons of distilled water. Each time you drop the hose, you should see less and less coolant and the color of the coolant.... eventually you will have 100% distilled water only in your system.

6) Drop the lower radiator hose one last time.

7) Reconnect hose

8) Look in manual for total system capacity and divide by 2 (for a 50/50 mixture).

9) Add the above amount of straight coolant to degas bottle.

10) Start motor and heater and keep adding coolant only until you have reached what you computed in #8 above.

11) Let motor idle and then add only distilled water to op off and maintain at the max mark (do not add any more coolant since your at the 50/50 concentration as it is).

12) Drive truck and ensure that all is well.

13) Let motor cool and add more water as needed - Be on look out for air bubbles that will need to work themselves out of your system.

14) After 1 or 2 days, keep eye on coolant level and add distilled water as necessary.


Good luck

 

I see a difference of opinion here. Which is it, the Ford Gold coolant or the silicate free Cat EC-1?

 

its up to you, but if you switch to the silicate free elc then you have to flush every drop of ford gold out of the system, which means probably running 30 gallons of distilled through there. I just flushed probably 25 gallons though mine and put the ford gold back in... its what ford uses, and if the coolant itself is the problem, that does not explain why lots of people use it and don't have any problems...

 

I flush with distilled water and use Ford Prem. Gold (every 50,000 miles) and have never had an issue. With fresh clean coolant, the silcates should not be "dropping out".

I did not add my coolant filter until 50,000 miles and now have 199,930 miles as of this evening.

 

Lot of people went with ELC, AFTER they had problems, after they install a filter, after they flushed. So this not prove that ELC is the ultimate answer.

 

there is the solution. I'm not a believer of the silcate dropout theory. there is too little silicate IMO to actually be the problem. The problem more seems to be just old coolant that has degraded from life/heat. Kind of like oil does