I am coming into my second winter with my 2007 Prius. According to the manual the antifreeze used in the car is a long lasting type. I am used to draining and flushing every two years. However, I believe this is not necessary with the Prius. Is this assumption correct? If so how long do people wait before changing the coolant?
Yes and I believe it's more involved then most other cars. I've seen where there is a special procedure to bleed air out after putting new coolant in.
It is difficult but very doable for the mechanically inclined. Weather it's needed before 100k is debatable though.
You've got that right. The bleeding procedure is a bleeding procedure (a poor play on British English). There are two coolant systems: one for the engine, one for the inverter. Both are very picky about trapped air. If you do your own coolant changes, make sure to get the service manual pages for the correct procedure. Along the same lines, bleeding the brake system is even harder. It takes a special Toyota service tool to activate the valves in the proper sequence. Don't even think about doing it yourself. Tom
When I bled the inverter I found an easy way to do it: I just hooked up power to the inverters coolant pump. It took about 5 minuets to fill it up completely. It was literally fill up the inverter reservoir, open the bleeder valve, turn on the pump and then keep pouring in coolant until the level in the reservoir was correct.
The Prius engine coolant bleeding procedure is not that different than a lot of modern cars. The anti-Prius (2001 Nissan Pathfinder V6 AWD), for example, was not very "user friendly". It usually took five or six warmup/cooldown cycles to get all the air out. And I had to use a home built device to do it. This after a very careful fill and bleeding procedure. Every two years for that vehicle, as it used ethylene glycol (usually dyed green). The Prius uses a version of propylene glycol (usually dyed pink), which is good for at least five years. For an overview of the air bleeding procedure check out the thread in the Technical section, wherein an owner was having trouble getting the air out. Posted by the below Patrick (thanks for the info Patrick).
Yes, the factory fill SLLC is good for 100K miles while refills are good only for 50K miles. Not sure about the reason for the difference - maybe this is because the engine coolant dry fill capacity is 9 quarts but only ~6 quarts are drained after opening the three drains. I recently helped another owner change both coolants on his vehicle with ~80K miles. The drained fluid looked like new, no debris, funny smells, or oil slick.
