A few weeks ago my power steering started acting funky. I checked my power steering pump fan and found that it was blowing fuses. The fan was shot (probably because I pushed through a lot of snow and mud this last winter and may have pushed some debris up into the fan). In any case, I had the fan replaced and it was better but still had some issues. I decided to change the power steering fluid and found all of the contrary information online about flushing the power steering fluid. Mini doesn't recommend changing the fluid out but seems to have their dealers include a flush in their maintenance practices. Since the pump may have overheated while the fan was out, I thought it wise to check the condition of the fluid. I extracted a couple of cups of fluid with a syringe that had a small vinyl hose attached to it. The stuff looked like old motor oil, not anything like the new Pentosin that I replaced it with. I did this a couple of times with intermittent start ups until the container of Pentosin was gone. It seems to help but why on earth would Mini not engineer a way to drain the power steering fluid?

 

You can drain the power steering fluid. The syringe was a good way to get the fluid out of the reservoir. However, you also need to disconnect the low pressure hose (rubber) going into the pump, as well as the high pressure hose (metal) to further drain the fluid. To get out all of the fluid though, you'd have to take off the pump and turn it upside down to drain the rest. Just make sure to put the car on jacks or magazine pages to bleed the power steering pump once you change the fluid. The power steering pump will only need about 3/4 of the Pentosin container.