Is a coolant change really this hard?

Read a lot of notes on the various suggested methods of doing a drain/flush/fill.
Several mentioned the know issue of bleeding the system.

While looking a the hose routing i notice the hose going to the oil cooler (have towing package) is on the engine side of the thermostat (vs the rad hose side.)

Was thinking that at the stage of adding new coolant I could temporarily disconnect this hose and keep adding coolant till some dribbles out. Then reconnect hose.

Thinking that will bring the coolant level up to at/or above the thermostat and eliminate most (bit not all of course) any air still in the engine block. Or at least enough that the thermostat will be exposed to flowing coolant and open properly when engine reaches the correct temp?

Does this sound reasonable? Seems pretty easy to do.

Prior to the addition of new coolant i was also going to disconnect one of the lines to the interior heating coils and blow out as mush of the old coolant as possible with compressed air (low pressure)


Any thoughts/concerns/comments?

 

Flushing the heater core is a great idea, if you use a garden hose, you can push out the gunk slowly and clean it out in both directions.

I used to flush heater cores as part of coolant flushes all the time, but modern coolant doesn't gunk up as badly.

The heater hoses are the ones used to bleed the system quickly. If you fill it up, bleed it, and still has air. You can pull the heater line off and burp the air trapped in the heater core.

 

After I did my drain and refill, I found that a seemingly useless bolt next to a front engine mount (passenger side I think) is another coolant drain plug. I'd open that one too next time.

 

Put me down in the camp of multiple simple drain and fills over the much more labor intensive flush and fill. I tend to do it once a year and it is fast and simple. Now if you have gotten behind and need to catch up, a full flush and fill or multiple drain and refills is likely needed.

 

I was thinking of using compressed air to force the old coolant out of the heater core since I didnt want the water to dilute the 50/50 premix coolant.
I would then hook up a funnel to the one line i disconnected to add/fill the heater loop with new coolant.

The coolant in it now is original with 7 years and only 55,000 miles on it. Like all my fluid changes I have done them on a much more frequent schedule than the factory maintenance schedule.