Originally Posted By: SumpChump
Ok, most votes the so far are saying that the plastic petcocks do not tend to fail or leak after use as was my concern. That's good!
I think you have a Camry. On mine I jacked it up enough to get a small bucket under it. Iirc about 5L came out. Not more than that. Or maybe it was 3L, forget now. I did not remove the petcock but let it drain slowly--went inside for some lunch. I left the air dam in place.
On my truck, also a Toyota, I had to remove the skid plate so I pulled out the petcock for faster draining. Which meant the driveway got a good dousing too--which was largely why I didn't pull it on the Camry.
My Camry seems to need topping off of the overflow tank yearly, so I didn't drain that. I did drain on my truck as it was at least two years old, and it will pull from that after this job.
I didn't want to deal with a full flush and fighting air bubbles, so I only did a radiator drain. I'd rather do this once a year. Easy and fast. Transfer station takes the old coolant so I dumped back into the containers.