If you completely drain and flush the system, can you replace it with good ol green antifreeze? or is is just as cheap to put dex cool back in?

The heater core in my sunfire started leaking , fogging windows and whatnot , so i bypassed it for now , it is summertime ya know .

I have been filling it with water , and driving it , then draining it trying to flush all the crud out, 2rd fill so far , still coming back out dirty.

 

If you drain it good, you can put whatever you want back into it. "Death Cool" is a know killer of water pumps, heater cores, and other stuff. I wouldn't put that back in under any circumstances. Google "GM DeathCool" for a couple hours of fun reading. Just as an aside, I would sell that thing before it dies on you. I had a 96 that I had to put a motor and tranny in less than 100k miles. Oil changed every 3-4k miles, tranny was a 3 spd "maintenance free" automatic. Motor was 2.2L 4 cyl.

 

I have a Sunfire in the yard that has 70 some k miles on it, needs a motor. Was well taken care of, daughter bought it new.

 

They're trash, just throwaway cars that don't even last long enough to pay off the note on. I eventually just GAVE the stupid thing away to be rid of it, never failed to break when I couldn't afford to throw money at it.

 

Mine has 190 000kms on it (that's 114k miles), and i have a huge student loan to pay off , as well as a few other things , i cannot afford to buy something else right now , so i drive this car.

The engine has one lifter/rocker that taps a little , i'll worry about it when it stops tapping 5 sp trans , just put a clutch in it in the fall, i hope to get the winter out of the car , then look for something else.

Unless i find a good CTD that i can afford , the car goes bye bye...

 

I use Prestone Long Life orange stuff instead of playin' the dexcool trick on my '97 gasser.

 

I don't see what's so wrong with it. Our past 2 chevy's have run it and we've never had any problems with it. They both had at least 80k on them when we sold them. Our 03 Dmax has it and after 50k miles everything's still good. We've never changed the coolant in any vehicle we've ever owned no matter how many miles we put on them (several of them had over 100k). Dex cool works great in all of ours.

 

that chebby that I ran in the classifieds here had that wonderfull orange coolant, all 144thousand miles, actual miles higher as I never adjusted the speedo to read correct with the 33's I ran on it for 120 thou, I did keep it cool with a 165 thermostat and changed oil every 3 to 4 thou...... come to think of it the coolant was the only fluid I never changed from day one. Sold with original clutch too ! Man I'll miss the sound of that truck, had a donaldson on it that you could drop a softball straight through that exited in front of the rear wheel.

 

Well , it is filled up with good ol cheap green antifreze now , so i'm not worrying anymore , went and looked at a CTD yesterday , going to see about beating the feller down on the price some on monday. I'll make my offer and let him think about it for a week or so.