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Has anybody done a cooling system drain themselves?

In the manual, it says to drain the radiator coolant by loosening the drain plug at the bottom of the radiator. Easy enough. It's supposed to be a white ****.

But then the manual says to loosen a bolt on the engine block. Why is this necessary? From the picture in the manual, it looks like it is up on the engine block near the oil filter.

 
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You must take it out or the old coolant that is in the block will remain. Prestone sells a complete flush kit for like $7 that you hook up to a garden hose and it really cleans it out good.

 
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If I stick with Honda's rad coolant I don't need to flush it out multiple times right? I can just drain and refill?

 
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Yup...drain and refill. Honestly I would just go to the store and use Prestone. That is probably what Honda uses anyway.

On a related note, the manual recommends a flush every 120k miles or 10 years on a severe schedule. I'll probably do it every couple years since the rust inhibitors and other components tend to break down.

 
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Don't use tap water..... use distilled water.

 
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werd, tap water's got all kinds of funky stuff in it

 
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I don't know about Prestone, but since our engine is all aluminum, we need a coolant that is designed for aluminum engines. Coolants designed for the older iron engines and whatnot have extra additives to prevent corrosion. That's what I gathered from other threads.

I've also been reading that the Honda coolant that they sell is actually pretty decent stuff so I don't have a problem using that.