Want to change my yellow coolant out of the 2003 V-10. Any tips?

Reason is it is the original fluid and mantainance manual says 100,000 miles or five years. I got 74,000 and 7 1/2 years on it.
<!-- / message --><!-- sig -->

 

I would put extended life in it then you dont have to worry about it. Any popular name is good. Budget depending of course. Some are premixed which means you dont add water, some is pure coolant. The straight coolant and premixed should be same price but straight coolant is the better deal cause your paying for 4lt or 1 gal of coolant and the other has water in it. Just mix it at 60% coolant maybe 70% at the most to get your correct freezing point. 50% will work if you live where it dosent ever get cold.

 

I like to use lifetime coolant from FleetPride.
Not cheap to buy, but than you don't have to worry about replacing it. It comes SCA balanced what helps as well. Can be mixed with other coolants.
Do me a favor and use distillate water only. It is 70 cents a gallon at Walmart.

 

Definitely need to get on it... once the anti-corrosion additives have worn out (5 years), the system starts corroding quickly. I just did a massive repair (head gasket, water pump, radiator, hoses, etc etc etc - well into 4 figures) on a 2001 car that the owner hadn't serviced the coolant in since new. There was so much corrosion (rust and aluminum oxide) that the water pump and 80% of radiator were plugged... She was lucky it only blew the head gasket.

And now for something entirely different...

I usually keep my vehicles for 300K + miles. While the OAT and hybrid coolants seem to be getting better than the original Dex-Kill, I have chosen to go back to what I KNOW will work...
Good old fashioned ethylene glycol (I use Peak, BMW, or Honda depending on the vehicle - we have 8 that I maintain) and distilled water, changed religiously every 2 years. I don't know of any vehicle or metal that won't be perfectly compatible with this.

If you are switching from ANY chemistry to ANY other, you need to flush flush flush and flush some more! A lot of these will react with each other and create nasty system plugging or metal eating things.

My only complaint now? It SUCKS to throw away and replace radiators that look PERFECTLY pristine and clean inside at 15 years old because the plastic tanks have degraded to the point they are cracking or blowing out. I've seen several failures of the plastic, and they seem to start getting fragile at around 12 to 15 years old.....