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How do you know when to change it?

The Civic is 3 years old, and it has not been changed once.

What symptoms should I be looking for?

 
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1. You could check the manual. Then again, Honda has some bizarre ideas of how long things should last.
2. At 3 years old I would definetly change mine, along with the brake fluid.
3. If you noticed any symptoms it wouldn't help to change the fluid, your seals would already be bad. You would hear lots of noise and rough turning. Our Cavalier did this at 70k.

 
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I checked the manual and you are right about the length of the service intervals.

 
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I checked the manual and you are right about the length of the service intervals.

Would you say a change every 1 to 1.5 years should be sufficient?

 
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For power steering fluid? Every 2 or 3 years should be fine. It's so cheap anyways, around $20 to do our accord. The brake fluid only cost us $7 or so.

 
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How do you flush and fill the system?

 
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Honda uses a vacumm style method to replace the power steering fluid. What you can do, and some other people do this is take a turkey baster and suck out all the old fluid and fill with fresh fluid. I was thinking about doing that.

 
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What about the fluid in the lines and the pump? Would you need to bleed the system after opening a line?

 
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I am not sure. Some people just have said they just remove the old fluid and refill with new fluid and have no problems. But I would take mine to honda and have them flush it. Like I said, they use a vacumm machine that fills it up while they are pulling out old fluid.

 
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I use the turkey baster method, but you need to make sure the fluid is hot becuase it will take out more crap. I do this every oil change, its cheap...

 
Rep Power: 283

(How I did our 97 accord)
1. A jack/stands
2. A bowl/cup/small container
3. A large container
4. Pliers
5. A bunch of Honda PSF (Around $20 worth in my case)

-Get the front end up in the air
-Remove the return line from the reservoir with pliers and let it drain into your small container (small because there isn't much room to work with here). Next, empy the small container into the big container. Then, put the return line in the container and turn the steering wheel back and forth. Empy the small container into the big container again. Do this a little more until you get as much out that is going to come out. Reconnect the return line, fill the reservoir with new fluid, start the car, turn steering wheel again. Turn engine off. Repeat the entire above process 1 more time. Put car back on the ground.

-You could flush your system two other ways.

1. You could disconnect the return line and skip to starting the car, resulting in a 10foot spray while the pump empties itself of all its fluid very quickly. That would speed up the process for sure. Then again, when was the last time you tried cranking your motor while draining the oil to speed up the process? Not what I would do.
2. You could use the good ol' dealer pressure (vacuum) flush. Spend more $ and you don't get dirty. But again, I don't like the idea of squeezing the lubricant out of moving parts so I would avoid this if you can. Flushes are just a way for dealers to save time, nothing special.