How to Replace Lower Radiator Hose 2002-08 Dodge RAM

Okay, friends, real quick before we get started on this job, hands, and eyes. We're gonna be dealing with chemicals. With that said, we wanna make sure we drain the coolant, and then we're gonna flush the system to make sure we can start off with brand new coolant by the time we're done. Let's go ahead and remove our radiator cap. Set that aside. Noticing that you have a plastic radiator and a plastic petcock, you might also find that the petcock just doesn't want to come out of there. If that's the case, obviously you don't wanna continue because you could damage the radiator.

So we're gonna move right along over here, which is the lower hose to the thermostat housing. Remove the clamp, just be prepared because coolant will come down. I like to put a nice funnel or a box carved out like this so it'll direct it into a nice bucket. At this point, we're gonna slowly take this off of here and try to direct this into our recycling receptacle. Now that we've got the other side off, let's go ahead and follow the hose to where it connects onto the radiator on the passenger side. We're gonna go ahead and squeeze this clamp. We'll slide it out of the way and get the hose right off of here. Go ahead and give that hose a wiggle. Let's get it out of here. There it is friends. Slide it in here, everything should wanna line up.

I'm gonna start with the thermostat side. You can start with whichever side you want. Slide that hose on there until it's completely bottomed out all the way around. We're gonna set our clamp so it's not completely up against the thermostat housing, but it's definitely covering the area on the hose where it's still over the thermostat housing. Let's just snug it up a little bit for now. Go ahead and do the radiator side, slide that all the way up. There we are. Go ahead and get your clamps situated. Once again you don't want it at the end of the hose, just maybe like a quarter-inch, even an eighth of an inch away from the end. Snug that up as well.

So now we're gonna just go ahead and make sure that they're nice and snug using a ratchet and an eight-millimeter socket. Once I feel as though it's kind of bottomed out, I'm just gonna try to go a teeny bit more, but you definitely don't wanna keep going until it ends up stripping out the clamp. Then you have to replace it again.

Now let's do the same to this other clamp. Okay, bottomed out, teeny bit more. Give it a nice wiggle, nice wiggle, everything's nice and tight. It'll be time to fill the cooling system. You want a nice funnel like this, and you wanna make sure you use the proper coolant. You wanna use coolant that's either orange or of course the universal coolant, but definitely not green. I'm gonna go with universal here. I'm gonna fill it right up. Now after you've run your vehicle for a while and you burped out all the air in it, you wanna make sure you go ahead and put your radiator cap back on here, push this right down, turn it so it's nice and tight and now we're gonna fill the overflow. Okay, close the hood, take it for a road test.