Sorry, I meant to say, I've been trying to change the coolant myself using the exchange via reservoir method. That is, I remove all of the fluid in the reservoir, then I add fresh coolant back in, for all 3. And repeat again in a few weeks (so far I've done it 3 times recently across a span of a few months). But, I think this is perhaps ok for the electronics coolant (total volume vs how much I can remove, 1/3?), and possibly OK for the battery coolant (maybe removing 1/5th?), I feel I am really not drawing out much for the ICE coolant from the overflow reservoir, and as the ICE coolant do go through more temperature change, I wanted to see if I can do a more thorough replacement of the ICE coolant. (I've done this on my regular ICE car via the burping method).
fyi I have installed the battery coolant sensor defeat plug few years ago, so when I do the exchange i can go as low as empty the whole reservoir. (but not any lower since I don't want any trapped airs).
Just curious if you've used more fancy tools to do the Volt's coolant. I am looking at vacuum coolant filler tools (AirLift?) on amazon.
The service manual says I can drain the coolant from the engine radiator by "remove the engine coolant temperature sensor from the radiator". Has anyone done something like this? Is it easy? What if I simply use a fluid extractor and try to suck up all the coolant from the radiator via the cap? (is it possible? will there be things blocking the tube from going all the way to the bottom?). If so, then after remove the coolant, I feel like I can fill it back in via the vacuum method. If I do slightly mess up and get some air in the engine coolant, I feel I can try the backup method of burping with the engine running as fallback...
Anyway, just curious if you've done it at the dealer or did it yourself also. I don't have any tools to trigger the car to go into special mode to deal with the coolant (purge air mode?).
If I can make the vacuum tool work reasonably well, I am thinking next to use the vacuum tool to also fill the battery coolant (use fluid extractor/hand pump to extract everything that I can, then vacuum fill it... )
I do most of the work myself on my cars, except the one time my Volt's windows regulator broke, and car was parked outside, so had to fix it quickly so went to the dealer. While I can swallow the cost (after crying a bit internally), what pisses me off the most is now the driver side window has an internal rattle everytime I close the door. Will one day open it up and see if they forgotten to tighten something or what... :( This is the only thing that rattles on an otherwise solid car after 10 years. So now you see my motivation for doing the coolant myself. ;)