Ok, please bare with me. I have a 99 7.3 , I am new to the diesel thing and am trying to figure out what I need to do to have the motor last a long time. It has a 181,000 miles on it with the green coolant. People have told me to change out to the fluid that walmart sells with the sca already in it. That's fine I was going to do that but then people are telling about all this silicon in the coolant and it ruining waterpumps and seals. My questions are should I install a filtration system, or is that over doing it. How much coolant does it take to do a complete flush?, should I replace the stat or should it be ok?


I am just getting so many different answers I question what's right or is it all right.

 

The green coolant is fine in our trucks, but you have to keep checking the SCAs and dump additives in when needed. I change green stuff every 30k, or roughly two years. I have the Gold stuff in mine which you can switch to. It is much less maintenance intensive and lasts a lot longer. Or you can go with ELC -- the "red stuff" is Rotella ELC or "Final Charge" at Wally World (my WM only has it in 50/50 pre-mix). I also found out you can get the concentrated Final Charge at Napa. That's probably what I'll do because I really prefer it to be 50/50. The reason the premixed 50/50 stuff doesn't result in an exact 50/50 mix is because there is quite a bit of water left in the block, heater core, etc. when you flush (even if you pull the plugs on the back of the engine).

I suggest you get 20 gallons of distilled water, 4 gallons of concentrated ELC (whichever you get a hold of easiest -- Rotella ELC and Final Charge are the same exact stuff). Then do this:

Drain the radiator & block. Fill with distilled water. Run engine. You can either pull the stat after draining and run it for a few minutes or leave it in and wait for it to heat up & open itself. If you pull it, don't run it long because the stat is part of the bypass and it will not get much circulation to the rear of the block without it. The idea is to run it enough to mix things up a bit. The issue with waiting for it to heat up is that it gets *VERY HOT* back there there and draining the block becomes a PITA if you have to wait for it to cool. It takes a lot longer to do it that way. You could always just not drain the block if you leave the stat in and cycle plain distilled once more (but you still have to let it heat up enough to open the stat and cool enough for you to open the system with out getting a steam bath).

Repeat draining, filling with water, and running engine.

At this point you should be pretty much all water. Drain, put the 'stat back in if you removed it, and dump the 4 gallons of ELC in. Then top off with distilled water.

That pretty much gets it all changed over and you'll be good to go for 300k. If I were opening the system like this and going through the trouble, I'd go ahead and put in the coolant filter to protect the water pump seals. Junk in there even after a complete flush will eat it up. And if you're going through all that, might as well get the 203* stat & billet housing, too. I'll be doing this exact thing in the spring...

Joe

 

Is there a web site I can get the stat, housing and filtration system?

 

I'm going to get mine here:
http://www.dieselsite.com/index.asp?...S&Category=203

You can look at some other places, but Bob has everything you need -- one-stop shopping!!

Joe