mixing brands of brake fluid?

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I need to change my front brakes and when I'm done I'm going to bleed all four brakes to make sure there is no air in the system. Last year I had a tire shop do a brake fluid flush because I have an 05 honda element and the brake fluid was getting pretty dark and my manual said to flush the system every 3 years. I know they used dot3 but I dont know what brand. I have two bottles of honda brake fluid. Is it ok to just bleed a little out then fill it up or is mixing brands bad and should I bleed the whole system?? Also if I should bleed the whole system how much brake fluid does that take?
 
Ok great! Thanks guys! Also I dont have a micrometer to check the thickness of my rotors. I have 70k miles on my element. Should the rotors last another set of pads? The pads arent all the way down to metal yet. The rotors are rusty on the parts where the brake pad dosent touch but I'm going to clean them up tonight when I do the pads. I got the duralast gold cmax pads and the guy at the store said that the rotors ushualy last two sets of pads. What do you think?
 
Flushing the system out gets all new fluid out. Bleeding the system gets some of the fluid out and the air out of the system.

I'd flush the system or bleed it until you've used up the whole bottle to get the most concentration of new fluid in there.
 
I agree. I would flush the system until I saw clear fluid coming out of each bleeder. I did this on my truck a few weeks ago and it took 2 quarts of DOT 3. I made 2 passes per bleeder, starting with the farthest from the master cylinder, working to the closest.
 
You won't see a difference between a 'flush' an a 'bleed'.
One could be better than the other.

BTW, you can fush an old brake system all day and then take the calipers and wheel cylinder off and look inside. You'll see lots of stuff hanging in the corners.

Mix away! Just don't use the odd ball silicone based fluid!
 
You should be okay on the rotors. Can you get a spec? Might be able to use an open end wrench as a pass/fail if it's an even number. (Scrape off the rust rings for a good read.

Remember service replacement is thicker than "discard".

I've never had a rotor wear out as long as I paid attention and didn't have a sticky caliper etc. They warped and got annoying first. Sounds like you got a quality honda pair; would not replace without without definitely condemning as the parts store ones are usually worse.
 
I have done fine with 2 fluids mixed. In many cases I would run out of Pennzoil DOT4 and have to add Valvoline DOT4.

Nothing bad happened.
 
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