Coolant Flush

That DIY looks pretty solid - good tips on there as well.

As for running the car - you want to heat it up enough to cycle the coolant through the system. If the system isn't hot enough, the thermostat won't open and it would circulate the system. Sometimes you can see the coolant move by leaving the radiator cap off and observing when it is moving. I don't recommend that some DIYers, as in some cases, the coolant may shoot out - those situations, better to leave the cap installed, warm it up to full temp, let if completely cool - drain and repeat.

If you were pretty conservative with getting up to temp - could be a several hour process to run enough distilled water to completely flush out the system. But since you don't have to do this very often - not too bad of an experience. There are tricks to speed this up - many of them are touched upon in the DIY write up.

Reason for running the heater on HIGH lets the coolant circulate through the heater core. If the heater wasn't turned on, you'd still have the old coolant left in the core.

The premixed coolant was designed for a drain and refill - not a flush procedure. If the area you live in doesn't get very cold or very hot - might get away with running a lower concentration of coolant to distilled water - but has some risks involved.

Best to do a flush, refill with Toyota Red + distilled water. After than - you can do a drain and refill with pink premixed, do a shorter run (30K miles or so), drain and refill with pink again on the normal schedule after that.

Couple of ways to do this:

Do a drain and refill - put Toyota Pink in there, repeat several times over a shorted period of time (depends on how far you drive, how often) - eventually, you'll dilute what was in there and have mostly Toyota Pink coolant and additives in there.

Do a full flush with distilled water, add Toyota Pink or Red. If using Red, figure out the total cooling system capacity - divide it by 2, that is how much Toyota Red to add. The rest will be distilled water. If using Pink, again figure out the total capacity, drain as much of the distilled water that is in there, add Pink, note the concentration. Do a series of drain and refills after the system has been run for some time, refill with Pink - eventually, you'll get the concentration to a point that is "good enough".

Also, if you use Red, you can do a drain and refill later - just use Red + distilled water, no need to flush.

With Pink, once you get the concentration up - you can just drain and refill with Pink, no need to flush.

You can also do a flush with Toyota Pink - similar to flushing with distilled water, but you don't have to worry about concentration at the end, as it will be pretty much set. Might cost more.

You can leave the Turbo Power Extended coolant in there and stock up on that coolant. Don't have to worry about a flush, just drain and refill. Just keep an eye on the water pump and replace it when a seal goes bad on it.

Pink and Red are technically not 100% compatible, as there is slightly different chemistry involved - but it doesn't stop the dealerships from adding Pink to Red coolant (Pink is backwards compatible, Red is technically cannot be used forward - but owners still use it). From what I gather from my dealer - eventually they will phase out Toyota Red and only stock Pink premixed coolant. How soon is anyone's guess. That point - someone will eventually figure out how to do it more efficiently with Pink coolant.

If you are going to stick with Turbo Power Extended Life coolant - then yes, just a drain and refill will be fine. If you are going to switch coolants, even though they may be compatible, usually procedure is to completely flush the old coolant out and replace with new coolant. Compatible doesn't mean it will play nice with the existing coolant - it means that the additive package will not destroy the cooling system in the car.

If you stick with the same coolant - then follow the manufacturer's recommended schedule. Could be as short as 30K miles, or could be as long as 150K miles - see what the bottle says. I haven't used this particular coolant, so I can't say what the interval should be.

Most DIYer's tend to stick with a conservative schedule - more for convenience than anything else - with the Toyota fluids, I like to change out the PInk stuff ever 60K miles, Red gets it at 30K miles. The coolant can go longer, but I stick to conservative schedules to give me a pretty big buffer just in case something comes up and I get sidetracked with other projects. This also gives you a chance to address issues that might have happened (leaking water pump, etc.) - catch them early before they become something more expensive.

I mentioned it in my post above - "Compatible doesn't mean it will play nice with the existing coolant - it means that the additive package will not destroy the cooling system in the car."

The standards only tell them what they have to meet to make sure they don't destroy the part they are intended to be used on, as far as lubrication, heat transfer, additive package. etc. Manufacturers are pretty free to mix their own cocktail of additive packages - each will "meet" the standard, but may not be interchangeable with each other.

Assuming that the mechanic did a full flush and replaced everything with the Turbo Power coolant, then pick a schedule that fits your available time. You know that the coolant supposed to protect you up to 150K miles or 5 years - whichever comes first. So you know the max point - just pick something before that point and you'll be good to go.

Both Toyota Red and Pink meet the JIS K 2234 standard. They also have to meet the Toyota TSK2601G coolant spec, this is unique to Toyota only - their own requirements for the coolant. Hence my mentioning that the standard does not equate to 100% cross-compatibility of chemistry.

I think it was BASF and Totachi and possibly Nulon that blended this formulation up (those are the major chemistry players involved, from what I gathered so far) only Nulon and Totachi "makes" coolants for automobiles, but they look different than the Toyota spec'd ones.