Am I wrong here?

Ok, I posted in the past about a cooling system issue which you guys helped out with very much. Basically my radiator was full of mud and you guys explained that it was all Dexcool that had gone bad due to air getting in my system through a crappy radiator cap. So I flushed my system and replaced the cap with a Stant cap as advised. This all happened about 4 months ago

Well that fixed the problem until 3 weeks ago. I was coming home from my girlfriend's house. Truck was cruising along fine,the temp gauge shot up to the red, sat for a second and then back to normal. I was in the middle of nowhere but there was a truck stop about 3 miles down the road. I slowed from 70mph to about 40mph just trying to make it to the truck stop. Well after 100 yards my truck cut off. Steam/smoke poured out from the engine bay. Well my engine was fried. After having it towed to the dealer, they found no coolant in the radiator although my reservoir was full!!! I did keep an eye on the reservoir but not the radiator itself. So luckily I had extended warranty. My engine with 69,000 miles on it was replaced with one with 17,000 miles on it (truck had 36,000 miles on it when I got it!) so that is all fine and dandy. I was just stuck with a crappy rental Kia Rio for 3 weeks.

What bothers me is this. I read up on the dexcool situation. This forum and others like it have all had people that have had problems with it. People replacing cooling systems, engines, or lucky enough to just have to flush it and go with the green coolant. I must have read hundreds, if not thousands of complaints on message boards and other sites. Cadillac, Chevy, GMC users in just about any vehicle GM put Dexcool in have had a problem with this stuff. 100,000 miles maintanence free my ass!!!

So I call GM customer service, talk to a nitwit, get a supervisor on the phone and then eventually her supervisor. They show no signs of GM recalling vehicles with this problem. They show no signs of doing so either. So they basically say "This is your problem, not ours" and that is the end of the phone call.

Now I can see why GM is having to cut 125,000 jobs and are not selling vehicles at all. No customer service. They do not care about the customer. Just the money. Which is fine, business is business. But if you see a problem this big come up, do something about it!!

So I am sorry to say that once I sell my blazer, this will be the last GM vehicle I will ever own. My first car was a 91 Camaro, second vehicle was a 97 S10, and now my third is the Blazer. My fourth will more than likely be a new Dodge Charger INSTEAD of the Trailblazer SS that is coming out which I had been saving up for.

Just sucks that a huge company can not admit a mistake and they are losing customers over it big time. I know because I work at a Ford dealership (at the parts counter, not a salesman) and I talk to tons of people daily who used to drive Chevy and are now converting to Ford.

At least Ford admits their screw ups.

If I am wrong please point it out. I just hate the fact that I would have been a life long GM customer and they did not give a crap. I get a new vehicle roughly every three years. I am 24 years old with a life expectancy of 72 years old. Do the math. That is 16 more vehicles if I stay single. If I get married I would make sure my wife drove one too so that number could possibly double. Plus my son, who is five, loves my truck and would have been a chevy fan too. So that is a ton of business on one person they have screwed over. I wonder how much business they have/will lose over major BS like this?

So I am sorry to say that once I sell my blazer, this will be the last GM vehicle I will ever own. My first car was a 91 Camaro, second vehicle was a 97 S10, and now my third is the Blazer. My fourth will more than likely be a new Dodge Charger INSTEAD of the Trailblazer SS that is coming out which I had been saving up for.


My '04 Chrysler Town & Country has Dexcool in it.
Dodge and Chryslers all use the same stuff, not sure about Ford.

Perhaps an Import may be your alternative.

Yeah but has Chrysler had the same problems with it like GM has?

I guess I fail to see where the Dex-cool is the problem. It sounds like a case of poor maint habits.

I have a truck with 168K on it...I have maintained the level checking when cold, watching resevoir tank, replacing caps routine, some say AC-Delco caps are bad...I change my annually and use delco and had no problems.

I have owned the vehicle for close to 7 years, had 0 problems with sludging of coolant....flushed at 100K and will again before winter.

Run DexCool in system, had no probelms, even had it analyzed through an independent lab and found it was very clear, clean, good to go coolant.

My daughter had a problem with an intake manifold gasket and it was because she said "the manual says you don't need to change it until 150K" and explained that did not mean that you do nothing like open the hood and check the puke tank etc....so she had extensive repair done...

I remain in the "works for me camp" and follow a maintenance regime that some say (my wife) is fanatical, but haven't seen the problems everyone else has.

GM is into making money not giving engines away...believe me....they would pull a coolant in a heart-beat if there was truly something wrong...

Routine maintenance, checking things, hoses, levels, by someone who knows that vehicle is important. If one is paranoid about DexCool then change it ..but it remains one of the extended life coolants that works....

Just flush your system more often or switch to another coolant....or buy a ford....

Yeah but has Chrysler had the same problems with it like GM has?

Don't know yet, it's only a year-plus/15k miles old. It took my '97 Blazer until it was 5+ years old/25k miles for the Dexcool to gunk up.

As a side note, Dexcool came out in the mid to late 90 models, and has been re-formulated since then, and Dexcool has lowered the life span because of many problems that can easily be searched on any web or blog page, including this site.

Are you wrong? I wouldn't say so, but there is that unknown maintainance factor when you buy a used vehicle. Having owned and serviced my Blazer since new, I have an advantage in knowing when things were done, and if the capacities were re-filled to the proper levels.

Good Luck whichever way you go.

My '04 Chrysler Town & Country has Dexcool in it.
Dodge and Chryslers all use the same stuff, not sure about Ford.

Perhaps an Import may be your alternative.

That's not Dexcool. It's G-05. G-05 is used by Chrysler and Ford, but Ford dyes it yellow and Chrysler dyes it orange..

I still don't believe this is a Dex issue. There must have been an underlying problem. Something along the lines of a bad hose, head gasket or leak in the radiator. As for the puke tank- dosen't that work on pressure? As pressure builds due to temp etc. the coolant purges and as the pressure drops the purge tank refils the system? Unless I'm mistaken then maybe the system wasn't holding pressure resulting in no suction to the purge tank.

No, it was a dexcool issue. If air gets into the system, the dexcool turns to mud. Plain and simple. Do a google search for "dexcool mud" or "dexcool problems" and read what I have read. I know what I am talking about. Dexcool was and still is the problem. Gm just does nothing about it. They could at least send a fyler out to customers asking them to ignore the owners manual. THe manual says the coolant should last 5 years/150,000 miles. I maintained the coolant as instructed. So have hundreds of others that have had the same problem. It is a problem with Dexcool, not the owner of the vehicle.

You never posted anything about "mud" in your system. All you said was...
"After having it towed to the dealer, they found no coolant in the radiator although my reservoir was full!!! I did keep an eye on the reservoir but not the radiator itself."

…nothing about you opening anything up and finding sludge or mud. You did state that you did not watch the rad level and over the course of 4 months it's plausible that your fluid leaked out somewhere. As for the Dex problems - I'm not saying that it's problem free but then again not many things are. In my experience I find that most breakdowns of "maintenance" items (oil, tranny rad fluid) is due to neglect whether it's accidental or not. I'm not trying to flame you in any way. The title of your post is "Am I wrong here". Strictly looking at your post I'm leaning towards maybe. The ultimate truth to all this is that the system is "sealed" and the only way for the fluid to cook down leaving just mud is for the fluid to escape as steam - a leak?!

You also never posted what failed causing all the steam. Did a hose burst?

Sorry, thought I did mention that once again mud was found all in the radiator after it was towed in. Funny thing, the warranty guy who came out to check it out before giving an OK on replacing an engine, his wife had a Jimmy that did the EXACT same thing. He looked at it for about 1 min and OK'd replacing the engine.


One of the mechanics said they found a pinhole right below the cap of the radiator. In the plastic part of it. I did not ask about the hoses. But it was not leaking before I left for my girlfriends house because my driveway is still spotless. So I have no idea what happened from my house to hers, or why the temp gauge failed to work properly. They replaced everything so I am fine now but unless GM puts out a notice of possible issues with Dexcool, I will not buy another GM vehicle. I have never had a problem with the green coolant doing anything like this. So they should recognize an issue and at least give the customers a heads up to closely inspect their cooling system every 10,000 miles because if that pinhole caused enough air to ruin my cooling system, it wont take much to do it to someone else.

And yes, once the new engine was put in, I had them flush everything and refill with green.

I always kept the system in my wife's Blazer at the proper level and it never had any visible leaks either. I figure that over the last 3 years I'd added maybe half a gallon of water/coolant total to keep the reservoir at the proper level. The reason everything got replaced was because I noticed that the cooling system just wasn't working as well as it should have, not because there were any leaks. It normally reached a normal temperature and stayed there. When it slowly but surely started running a bit warmer (still well within normal) I decided to investigate.

The reservoir was still at the proper level, but when I looked into the radiator itself I saw the carnage. It looked more like an artifact from the Titanic than a part from a (then) 5 year old car. The radiator hoses also were reduced to ~ 2/3 flow capacity and were nice and crunchy when squeezed. After the radiator and hoses were replaced the nice clean fresh coolant just came spewing right out of the previously sludge-sealed water pump. The shop I took it to told me that he sees Dex-Cool filled systems like that every day. He owns a couple of GMs and the first thing he did was flush/fill with the green stuff.

Based on numerous word of mouth complaints, the stories from the shop, and the fact that there are class action lawsuits pending against GM regarding Dex-Cool I tend to believe that the stuff has problems. Any product with that many complaints needs to be redesigned or replaced. If it can't avoid sludging with any minor introduction of air in the system it should not be used in any road-going car. Expecting a system using DexCool to be impervious to any air leaks really isn't a practical requirement for a road car. The entire purpose of this stuff was to reduce the amount of maintenance required. If you end up having to flush/fill one pretty much the same schedule as conventional coolant or run the risk of sludging what's the point?

i have a 95 with the dex cool. i ran the cap it came with. changed the dex cool in 2000 and flushed it out. all fine. a guy down the street also has a 95 but flushed his out and put in the green stuff. his runs hotter then mine. i've never seen it go above 200. i now have a stant cap which i got few months ago. i always used the one it came with and never had any problems with dex cool.

Sorry, thought I did mention that once again mud was found all in the radiator after it was towed in. Funny thing, the warranty guy who came out to check it out before giving an OK on replacing an engine, his wife had a Jimmy that did the EXACT same thing. He looked at it for about 1 min and OK'd replacing the engine.


One of the mechanics said they found a pinhole right below the cap of the radiator. In the plastic part of it. I did not ask about the hoses. But it was not leaking before I left for my girlfriends house because my driveway is still spotless. So I have no idea what happened from my house to hers, or why the temp gauge failed to work properly. They replaced everything so I am fine now but unless GM puts out a notice of possible issues with Dexcool, I will not buy another GM vehicle. I have never had a problem with the green coolant doing anything like this. So they should recognize an issue and at least give the customers a heads up to closely inspect their cooling system every 10,000 miles because if that pinhole caused enough air to ruin my cooling system, it wont take much to do it to someone else.

And yes, once the new engine was put in, I had them flush everything and refill with green.


No problem! That changes things quite a bit! I personally haven't had any problems with Dex. I've had it in my trucks for the last 11 years. I put 150k on my s-10 p/u and never saw any signs.
Good luck with the new engine!

My thought about the air seems funny to me. For antifreeze to work there must be water. If I am not wrong , water has air in it. So how would you start the air from mixing? Hay there may be some issuses with DEX cool but mantenance is most important. And it also sounds as the last problem was created my the first. Overheating.

My thought about the air seems funny to me. For antifreeze to work there must be water. If I am not wrong , water has air in it. So how would you start the air from mixing? Hay there may be some issuses with DEX cool but mantenance is most important. And it also sounds as the last problem was created my the first. Overheating.
GM made an announcement that most of the problems are caused by faulty caps. Going by what GM says: The issue of "air getting into the system" isn't that air mixing with the dexcool causes the problems. Air doesn't cause the dexcool to sludge.....contaminates do. The problem is caused by the caps not holding pressure and sealing correctly (due to poor design). I'm sure you know that when the system is operating normally...when the engine heats up, the coolant expands and is released through the rad cap into the reservior, then when the system cools, it draws coolant back in from the reservoir. I'm sure you also know that pressure on the system increases the boiling point of the coolant 3-4 degrees per 1 psi.The faulty caps don't keep the system sealed which interferes with the cycle, causeing lower coolant levels (air in the system). The lower coolant levels as well as the lower boiling temp causes the coolant to overheat, which causes you to lose more coolant and the cycle continues, accelerating as it goes.

I read a post recently by Chris Stewart (he is the guy that helps everyone in the Bravada forum) that he received info that the sludging is stop leak pellets that GM threw in to the engine when they were new the combat the leaking gaskets. This seems to make more sense than GM's explaination. It would also explain 2000blazerls's experience....after flushing the sludge from the system, he developed a leak (appearently internal, because he saw no signs) and lost all his coolant.

My thought about the air seems funny to me. For antifreeze to work there must be water. If I am not wrong , water has air in it. So how would you start the air from mixing? Hay there may be some issuses with DEX cool but mantenance is most important. And it also sounds as the last problem was created my the first. Overheating.


Just for the record water does not contain air. It contains oxygen - pretty big difference.

Nice post Blazee. Leakstop.... HHmmmmmm!