I have these garden hose repair adapters I got at Walmart for $1, allows me to attach the hoses of my '95 Ford Explorer's heater core to garden hoses. I have used them and water pressure to clear my heater core three times now. All three times trash flows out and the water appears to flow freely. This last time I also ran Prestone Radiator flush+Cleaner through the whole cooling system for three days (as per the instructions) hopefully to get out the trash that might be clogging the heater core. Whelp, right on schedule, two weeks later the heater core is completely clogged again and there is absolutely no heat what-so-ever.

I don't understand why this can keep happening like this. I feel I must be overlooking something. When they get old enough, do they rust by themselves fast enough to do this? Maybe I should try snaking it to get a bigger opening so it at least takes longer to rust shut?

1/11/2019 12:37:38 PM

flush a lot and add an inline filter/inspection section

1/11/2019 1:25:33 PM

once the "fins" start to go, you might as well get another core...

1/11/2019 4:53:38 PM

MIL used to have a taurus with the 3.0v6. It would clog the heater core faithfully once per year.

I think it had a bad headgasket. She drove it like 3 miles a day, so it never really got hot anyways.

1/11/2019 7:47:29 PM

^^^ That sounds cool, I am totally doing that!

1/11/2019 9:31:44 PM

uh.. you're using distilled water to fill up the system in the end, correct?

don't be using that tap or well water.

Quote :

"95 Ford Explorer"

treat yo'self, friend

[Edited on January 13, 2019 at 10:20 PM. Reason : add a note]

1/13/2019 10:20:14 PM

i've always flushed with a garden hose, then the clean and dump with distilled and final fill with distilled

1/14/2019 7:37:22 AM

absolutely, I only flush with the hose. I fill with non-diluted antifreeze then top up with distilled.

1/14/2019 9:13:14 PM

Quote :

"MIL used to have a taurus with the 3.0v6. It would clog the heater core faithfully once per year."

Ugh I had one of those. Pretty sure that era of Taurus had a poorly designed heater core. This was a very, very common issue.

1/17/2019 9:37:18 AM