Hot damn! Err…cold damn!

I finally decided to get off my duff and mess with my AC in the car again.  Since it was oh, 102 today.  I had previously thought that the refrigerant was leaking out as fast as I could put it in, but a while ago my compressor would engage and disengage on, off, on, off, when the AC or the defrost was on.  So that lead me to believe that the system was actually holding some of the charge I’d put in it quite a while ago.

On my AC system there is a pressure switch that won’t let the compressor come on if the pressure gets too low.  If you run the compressor without enough oil and pressure it’ll over heat an seize up.  A problem I was running into when I was trying to charge the system last time is the compressor wouldn’t run.  It would overcharge the low side, the compressor would kick in and equalize the system, then the pressure would drop, and the compressor would go off.  So it was on, off, on, off, a very slow process and it didn’t seem to be helping any.  After reading around on oldspower.com I found out I can just jump the pressure switch (so it thinks the pressure is good) and the compressor will run continuously.  This way I can keep charging and steadily bring the pressure up.

About 1 1/2 of these cans later and the compressor would run even with the switch hooked up.  I hop in the car and lo and behold there’s cool air coming out of those vents!  YEEE HAW!  It’s not freezing cold.  But it was cold enough to make it comfortable in my car for my test drive when it was 97 outside.  That’s good enough for me!  Hopefully it holds the charge.  Since it lost the original charge there’s obviously a leak somewhere.  But it seems to have held what I put in there from last year, and even if I have to charge it once a year, I’m okay with that!