Flushing coolant, should I do my cooler as well?

[ibanez0154]

I originally planned on doing a coolant flush, putting a filtration setup on and refilling obvious using elc to fill it back up. I just read in another thread that it's reccomended to replace the cooler at the same time? Sorry for the novice question but I'm very new to the 6.0.

[the06wildebeast]

Its a wise idea. If you don't you could potentially or more than likely plug it with all the "crap" from the system.

[wjeffp2000]

I would get a set of gauges before I did anything if I were you. Who knows you made not need to do anything. You will want a set of gauges in the near future, you may as well get them now and see what the delta is. If they are on the higher side 15 or above, most of the time flushing makes it higher. It stirs up crap that gets caught in the cooler. There is a procedure for back flushing which can help. There are several detailed instructions for flushing on here. If your deltas are high you will probally wind up addressing the egr cooler as well.

[nylyon]

Why in the world would you replace a part such as an oil cooler as part of a maintenance routine? You replace the oil cooler when the efficiency of the oil cooler decreases to the point that downstream components become jeopardized. You can determine this by installing gauges and monitoring your critical engine parameters such as engine oil temperature and engine coolant temperature.

When you flush, just be sure that you do it right and if you're concerned about plugging your oil cooler it doesn't take much time, cost or effort to reverse flush it. Instead of recommending replacing an oil cooler, I would recommend getting gauges.

For additional information on flushing, you can look here:
6.0 coolant flush write-up