Hello, This is my first post here and would love some advice to see how bad I screwed up…or if I’m overthinking. On Monday I topped off my fluids but didn’t tighten my reservoir cap all the way, so coolant shot all over the place. I didn’t notice until Friday night when my truck warmed up extremely fast and I checked under my hood to see the mess I made. I wasn’t paying attention to my temp gauge and now fear of the damage I might have caused. I don’t have any knocks, thumps, or ‘milkshake’ in the oil, and when I added water (just to get home), it came back up orange, so there was some coolant in the radiator. I only drove it on Monday and Friday and let it sit over the weekend. Any advice?
As long as there’s nothing in the oil, you might want to replace the reservoir just in case. Or just check for any leaks and clean up as best you can. Brake cleaner works good for that. Use it in the open 
. Good luck, my friend!
@Ari
I’ll steal some from work 
. Thank you!
Xian said:
@Ari
Use it in the open? You telling me you don’t like working high?
All the time, but damn not with this! 
Only time will tell. If you’ve driven it since this happened and notice no changes in performance or sound, you’re probably okay. If anything happened, you may have blown the head gaskets. Keep checking the oil for coolant intrusion and for any coolant leaking around the heads. If you don’t see any of this, you most likely caught it in time.
@Bailey
I for sure have a small coolant leak, but it’s leaking by the reservoir, so I gotta see if I blew a hose or nicked it or something.
@Bailey
Genuinely no performance change, and I kinda abused it the other day after finding no ‘milkshake’ to really test it. Oil still looks brand new, and coolant has a small drip.
After you discovered your mistake, how much coolant did you need to add to get it back up to the fill line? Did you burp it after filling it? If you didn’t see steam coming from under the hood, then you didn’t actually boil off any significant amount of coolant, meaning you didn’t overheat the engine.
@Haru
I stuck a garden hose in and filled it to the mark. It didn’t take a crazy amount of water; I saw it come up after 5-10 seconds.
Those trucks are designed to go into limp mode in case of overheating. They go into 4-cylinder mode so the intake and combustion temps don’t get too high. Get an oil change and flush the coolant system.