The good news about the care and feeding of your intercooler itself is that not much is needed. Pared down to the basics, an intercooler is an air-to-air heat exchanger. According to Wayne Thomas of Pacific Oil Cooler Services, Inc.—one of the biggest repair stations that specializes in repair and overhaul of oil coolers and intercoolers—an intercooler doesn’t see the internal pressures oil coolers do and, accordingly, don’t usually wear out. He said that ordinarily intercoolers easily last to engine TBO, at which point they should be pulled, inspected and repaired as necessary.
Also, unlike oil coolers, some leakage is acceptable in intercoolers. Where there is zero tolerance for leakage in an oil cooler, finding a small air leak in an intercooler is not a yank-it-and-fix-it-now discovery. There’s time to evaluate the extent of the leak and whether it requires further action.