2004 XLT Front Heater Core Replacement

[BlakePorterMcLain]

Hello, a few weeks ago I noticed steam coming from my vents and coolant temp rising when driving home. Checked coolant, it was low. Found coolant on passenger side floorboard that looked like it’s coming from behind the dash, indicating my heater core was leaking. I bypassed it so I didn’t have to deal with it right away, which fixed the coolant leak but obviously now it’s just miserable driving without heat hahaha. Can’t seem to find any videos for the 2nd gen Expeditions anywhere showing how to access the front heater core and I’m a little nervous to just start taking stuff apart. Anybody ever dealt with this? Or possibly have a service manual that I can’t find?

 

[AWAR]

I use these free online factory service manuals all the time. Sometimes you have to explore to find exactly what you are looking for but it is all in there.

 

[whtbronco]

The service manuals AWAR posted will provide the needed info. It's a fairly big job, book time is 7.8hrs. That means it would take me 3 days most likely as I tend to be slow. In the service manual if you look up heater core replacement it basically guides you to plenum chamber removal to find the process. I wanna know if you actually have to discharge the A/C or if you're not replacing the evaporator core if that is not required.

It's a shame replacing the heater core on newer vehicles is so time consuming and challenging. It took 30 minutes or less on a 70's Ford truck.

Out of curiosity, do you have any idea how often or if the coolant has ever been completely replaced?

 

[BlakePorterMcLain]

The service manuals AWAR posted will provide the needed info. It's a fairly big job, book time is 7.8hrs. That means it would take me 3 days most likely as I tend to be slow. In the service manual if you look up heater core replacement it basically guides you to plenum chamber removal to find the process. I wanna know if you actually have to discharge the A/C or if you're not replacing the evaporator core if that is not required.

It's a shame replacing the heater core on newer vehicles is so time consuming and challenging. It took 30 minutes or less on a 70's Ford truck.

Out of curiosity, do you have any idea how often or if the coolant has ever been completely replaced?

Sorry for the late reply, I dropped the engine in back in June. Whole new cooling system, never recharged the Freon so not sure about if it needs evacuating. Still haven’t gotten around to fixing this but I’ll get back to you

 

[drankinatty]

*Side Note on charm.li Manuals*

The [factory service manuals](https://cham.li/) that AWAR linked to are the actual service manuals and provide the pinpoint diagnostics for all Diagnostic Trouble Codes (DTCs), which includes all connector pinouts, wire color-codes in diagrams, etc.., as well as step-by-step procedures to replace all parts covered. As you would expect the allotted labor times and warranty time for each repair is also included. Great resource.

It's worth mentioning that at the top of each manual, a link is provided to download an archive for the entire manual for each year/model. The archive contains all pages, images and navigation menus that make up each manual. (they literally just zipped the directory containing each manual and make that available for download) So if you have a web server running at home, or elsewhere, you can simply download and extract the archive to anywhere under the document root of your web server. Nothing else is needed, all links within the manuals are relative (as opposed to absolute) and work regardless of where you put the manual (e.g. which directory under your server you extract the archive to).

They run fine, and being ever cautious I've scanned all pages and images through a virus/malware scanner and they are clean (as of 12/25). Earlier manuals are roughly 150MB, later manuals up to 350MB in size. It's a win-win. Charm does it to save demand and bandwidth on their servers, and for you, run locally across a LAN is much snappier than pulling from the internet (and ensures your manuals remain available to you should your internet be down, or should the charm site go away)