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I was wondering how you guys drain the cooling system.

I've had several Peugeots and they all had a tap in the radiator bottom. Place a large bowl under the car, open the tap, go for a cup of coffee and the cooling system was empty.

To drain the cooling system of my BMW i've to disconnect the bottom hose from the radiator and then the coolant flows in all uncontrolable directions and it gets messy on the floor.

Are there better ways or tips for draining the cooling system?

Nope, that's how it's done. Not sure if there is scope to add a tap in somewhere though. Perhaps via a Y connector somewhere?

When I recently did a coolant drain, I used the temperature sensor on the bottom left-hand side of the radiator as my drain. I place a bucket under the car and used a piece off flexible plastic (like one of those flexible cutting boards for the kitchen) to direct the flow into the bucket. I used the same setup to drain the block. It went well with little to no spillage.