Dexcool or not

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ROGELIO A GUZMAN

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Fellas.

Like I posted before. I replaced the water pump of my xl 6.0 . I hear many mixed feelings about dexcool. Should I replaced the watered down dexcool in my engine for the green stuff. Or is dexcool better now. I've seen that it turns into mush. Any feed back is welcomed.
 

wjburken

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Fellas.

Like I posted before. I replaced the water pump of my xl 6.0 . I hear many mixed feelings about dexcool. Should I replaced the watered down dexcool in my engine for the green stuff. Or is dexcool better now. I've seen that it turns into mush. Any feed back is welcomed.
From what I have read and seen here, Dexcool is fine. The green stuff is fine. The two mixed together is trouble so if you’re going to switch, you need to make sure you completely flush your system to remove all of the one before you add the other.
 

96-2D-Hoe

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I was tempted by this but decided to just stick with what the manufacturer recommends. There is a difference. Pretty sure when the system is full/not leaking there is no mush/sludge from dexcool. But I did get some of that when my rad was leaking and the system wasn't full a few years back.
Use distilled water with the undiluted coolant.
 

Larryjb

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Dexcool was an issue with nylon gaskets. This issue had to do with the buffer used (sodium 2-ethanol hexanoate). In our engines there are, AFAIK, no nylon gaskets in contact with coolant. On the older 5.7 there are, but gasket failures in the 5.7 seem rare.

That said, if you want to change out Dexcool, most of the green stuff actually has some of the same buffers as Dexcool (sodium 2-ethanol hexanoate). Instead, you would want to use the gold coolant which uses borate buffers.

However, given the effort to flush the cooling system so thoroughly, and the fact that Dexcool doesn't cause any harm to our engines, it's pretty much pointless to do so. If you have a GM V6 I might swap it then.
 

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