AC not working!!! The CAR WIZARD shows how to easily isolate the problem

welcome back to the wizard shop weather's getting kind of warm out we're going to go over some ac tips right after this [Music] so you're cruising along in your car and it's a really warm day your ac starts blowing warm we're going to go over some quick tips that you can go through before you take it to a shop and kind of get an idea what's going on what could be wrong with your ac system and it may be something that you can fix at home so when your ac quits there are multiple multiple reasons of why it quit things that can cause it to stop could be that it's low on refrigerant it could be the compressor clutch has failed electrically or mechanically it could be the compressors locked up it could be that your hvac module or the system that controls it has a fault or something's wrong it could be a pressure sensor that's on the ac system it could be a multitude of things but i'm gonna show you some tips here in a minute that can really narrow it down to a few things today we're going to use this little honda element and show you some tips and tricks we also got a couple compressors on the cart i want to show you a scenario that we had in the shop the first thing i'm going to do is turn on the ignition i want to show you guys something so your ac compressor has stopped running electrically we're going to find out why the only reason a compressor stops compressing is that there's a power issue with the clutch or it's locked up and ruined we're going to start with the electrical portion of it today the first thing you want to do is in your owner's manual or look online or google it and find out where is the ac compressor relay on this honda you can see the little snowflake right there which indicates right here that's the compressor relay we're going to remove that i'm going to get a test light set up let me grab it for you hook the alligator clip in to ground i want to before we get started any further always verify that your test light works because it could totally throw you out of kilter really fast so let's do that yep it's good not a blown bulb or anything so in this relay socket here that would be power coming from a fuse this is power going to the compressor right here power coming from a fuse power going to the compressor these are the control portions right here here's the relay socket we have power coming from here and it goes through the relay and goes through this pin to the compressor i've got this hooked up to power and we can see that the compressor is good we're going to prove that here in a minute what we're trying to prove right here is that inside the dash the system that controls the ac is not faulty once we can get past that we can completely forget about the inside the interior of the car and focus on the engine bay so i'm putting the test light into this pin right here this is where the computer will ground the relay to turn on the clutch on the compressor right now it's not on so i'm going to start the engine i'm going to turn on the ac button on the dash okay so it lights up the light that tells us one thing we have no trouble in the interior with the controls the climate control system the buttons there's nothing going on no codes in the module it wants to turn on the ac so now we can focus on the engine bay let's prove whether or not there's power actually getting to the compressor and the way i'm going to do that is my handy-dandy relay switches you guys have seen in the past they're actually on my amazon affiliates page if you click the description below this takes place of the standard honda relay and i control turning it on and off so let's plug this in and now we're going to listen you're going to hear the clutch click back and forth so now we know there's no broken wires there's no bad grounds and there's no burned up clutch coil on the compressor otherwise it wouldn't engage so we have power coming from the dash to turn on the relay which means we're good inside the dash and we can get power to the compressor and the clutch works so it'd be very likely that this system might be low on freon it's not this there's nothing wrong with this ac i'm just using his demonstration the next thing you want to do i want to show you a little tip is with the with the refrigerant the next thing we're going to do is take off the caps off of our refrigerant service ports when servicing an ac system whether it be for a house or for a car the epa says a dynamous amount of freon or refrigerant is allowed to escape into the air that means a tiny little bit it does doesn't mean you go spraying it all over the place the tip i'm going to show you is we're just going to take a small screwdriver and push the schrader valve inside the service port that's it that's all you do we know there's freon in there if you push the little service valve and nothing happens then you know you're out of you're out of refrigerant there's a leak somewhere or something's happened and you're completely out of refrigerant it can be just low enough that it's not enough to turn on the pressure switch which is right here there's a little switch it's actually mounted on the ac line right there the hard line in the old days you could just take a paper clip and bypass that and prove whether it's bad or not but on today's cars you cannot do that they're actually very delicate sensors that sense to the psi how much pressure is there they're not just on and off so you don't want to jump the pins on a modern ac system it's not a good idea if it's just a little bit low on refrigerant there's no way for you at home to know accurately how much is in the system how much does it need i can guarantee you especially hondas are extremely picky about how much refrigerant they have if it's an ounce too much or an ounce too little it can make it not run at all this is my matco ac machine i think it's made by robin air i'm not sure who makes this for them but these are about four or five thousand dollars this is not something you're going to just buy to work in your garage or this is what a professional buys there's many times that people bring me a vehicle and say oh i bought a few cans of freon at walmart and it's still not working well it's probably because it was two ounces low or three ounces low enough to trigger the pressure switch and shut off the ac now you instead of adding the the two or three ounces needed you've added 16 ounces now it's too much and it goes too high and the pressure shuts off again with today's cars you really can't just buy a can at walmart and fill it up you really need to take it to a shop the method that i will use is connect this machine to the vehicle and evacuate all the refrigerant out and it weighs it there's a scale inside of here he'll tell me exactly what's in the system and i can tell you how low it is what you do is you refill it back to full capacity and you're back in business that's not something you can guess and you can't guess that with a can that you buy at a store so that is the refrigerant portion of what can cause your ac to quit working if you're going down the road and it goes kind of cool then it gets cold and then it's warm and back and forth that's a sign that it's just a little bit low just enough to start triggering the pressure switch i have two compressors on a little cart here i want to show you guys something and talk about a scenario that we actually had in the shop today but what we've decided on this car is that there's power coming from the from the dash to turn on the ac and we prove that we can get power to the compressor there's not an issue with electricity it'll be if you could look at refrigerant or you could look at some other issue another thing you might want to do is find your ac compressor and manually turn the nose of it and see if it's not locked up and we're going to show you guys that right as we move over to this cart so here we have a good working ac compressor that actually came from hovey's apollo 911 this is the original porsche ac compressor we're going to use it to show you guys how the clutch works and then here is a bad one as your ac compressor is situated on your car you don't want to turn the pulley that turns freely it's the center portion that you want to turn it should spin with a little resistance because there's refrigerant in there under pressure it should be kind of tight to turn but you should be able to turn it if you get under your car and you turn it and it's just it's locked up your compressor is shot and in that scenario it's going to require new condenser new compressor receiver dryer and flush the entire system if you do not replace all those components in that order they won't even cover the warranty on the new parts you're putting on your car you have to do that new condensers you get small debris inside them they're so small these days you can't flush it out so you put a new compressor on and call it good and a small piece of debris breaks loose from the condenser and floats around in the system and finally makes its way to your brand new compressor and scores it up and destroys it and if you call a warranty or try to claim warranty on your compressor they're going to say well did you can replace the condenser and flush the system and replace the receiver dryer oh no i didn't really have enough money to do that i didn't do those things they're going to say your warranty's void now here we have a compressor that mechanically is fine it it would actually pump and work except for the fact electrically it has failed the compressor coil inside of here is dead it's actually a customer we had today we had in the shop i proved that that was the problem using the steps i just showed you and i knew without a doubt this compressor is the problem and he didn't believe me he thought that i didn't know what i was talking about he called several times and was pretty upset i almost wanted to pull the work out of here because he thought i didn't know what i was doing but we're going to prove here that i do know what it's doing we've got the new compressor on now and it works beautiful an ice cold ac so i know that was the problem but let me show you guys electrically what's supposed to happen and what can happen on one that's failed so you guys aren't going to see my face but i want you to focus on the compressors not my face i've got wiring hooked up to the good compressor ground and the power wire i'm going to apply battery voltage and you're going to see this move in and out and make a noise whenever you turn on the ac on your car if everything's in in good order your refrigerants at the right level and there's no issues all it does is apply voltage like this and it locks in place this pulley that see it spins free right now i'll show you i'll get it going pretty good spinning watch what happens when i engage it it stops now the whole thing turns is one unit and when you want to turn off your ac now it spins free that's how an ac compressor works is how it disengages and engages from the serpentine belt this one works good we just saw that it works now let's try the bad one special wiring hooked into the pins here hey car wizard aren't those those test leads that you have on your affiliate page yes i have an entire kit of test leads that have all the different styles of pins that you can hook right into a connector without damaging pins so now i've got power and ground hooked up here directly into the connector and we're going to put straight voltage to it and nothing happens that's because the magnetic coil that's energized inside of here is short-circuited or cut or failed or just burned up from age is that something that they can test while it's still in the car yeah we just did that actually on this honda we checked at the relay we put power to the compressor from that relay it goes right here to these wires that's why we heard it click back and forth when we did my little manual relay we prove that it clicks on the clutch it works we can also prove is the computer telling it to turn on and we did prove that with the test light if you turn on your ac and your test light does not light up it's either low on refrigerant or there's a code a fault code or something's wrong inside the dash hey car wizard how likely is it for the fuse to be blown it could be a fuse you might want to check your ac fuse for the compressor it could be what's wrong as well why you're not getting power but if you're getting power then you know the fuse is good and then also we checked on the relay we put like i said put power to the compressor and it clicked on and off so you would know from the dash all the way to compressor there's no problem so i've had many customers like i just mentioned a minute ago bring me a vehicle and say my compressor is locked up and they we put it on the lift we confirm that that is the case and i quote them seventeen hundred dollars for a complete ac system and they're like well i just need the compressor and like i just mentioned a minute ago when these go bad and lock up the center portion doesn't turn anymore it sends pieces of metal through all those lines inside your dash up front by the radiator is full of metal particles if you put just a new compressor on all those particles go right into your new compressor and just shreds it to pieces and you'll have another locked up compressor again i have actually experienced a customer who put on his own compressor and he said i've been through three of these things they're making bad compressors they're sending me junk it is possible you get a bad compressor not three times in a row i finally got his vehicle in and pulled one of the lines off and it was like spray paint like glitter it was just metal all in the lines three compressors he burned up because he didn't clean out his system your receiver dryer has a desiccant filter inside of it it will also be completely plugged in full of particles inside of that on some cars it looks like a big metal can and here's a picture of one right here but like on this honda it's actually part of the condenser it's a little tube shape that's on the side of the condenser just like a sock inside of there a desiccant packet you would replace that with a condenser anyway so you get a new one but if your compressor ever locks up and you take it to a reputable shop prepare for a big shop bill if you want it done right so when these issues arise it never fails that it's 105 degrees outside and it's always at the most inopportune time and at a time that it's not planned for as far as finances wise it always happens that way it's it stinks it really does i hate that for people when it happens it's like oh no this is not good i wanted to show you guys a few tips if your ac starts blowing warm on you there's a few little things you can run through and kind of get an idea of what's going on just like the scenario on the bad compressor i showed you all it is is a clutch it's not mechanically failed so i feel confident that i can just put a new compressor on and as the results have shown it fixed this problem in shops today you can get into trouble if it's just a small electrical problem they will still quote you the entire ac system hundred dollars seventeen hundred dollars and all it was is a two hundred three hundred dollar compressor one last thing before we close out i wanted to say is some people say why can't you just replace the clutch on the compressor and you can but we have to remove the compressor off the vehicle anyways and that by the time you pay for the clutch and the labor for a shop to pull all that off and put it back on you're usually at the cost of a new compressor it doesn't make sense it's not financially feasible it makes more sense just to get a complete new compressor now car wizard some people might just say hey forget it i don't really want to have ac i can live without it i mean i lived without it as a kid in our car you know our volvos with no ac just windows down but is that actually a good idea if that's what you want to do it's not going to hurt the car anymore in the middle of summer it's not going to be a problem it's not a big deal but in the winter your defrost may not work as good because it's not pulling the moisture out of the air even in the middle of winter your ac compressor runs to run your defrost to dry the air so it may have an issue there won't be too bad but you might want to get it fixed for that reason alone depending on where you live that actually could be a really big problem i know we use it here in kansas a lot in the winter unfortunately nice shirt mrs wizard hey thanks i designed a new one i thought you guys might like it you know who the boss is really new shirt link down below look in the description guys right so anyways i thought i'd show you guys some tips that you could look at your own ac issues maybe fix it yourself maybe it's a bad relay maybe it's a fuse and you can be back in business and ac running again so any of the tools i've used here especially the relay switches check my amazon affiliates link below if you haven't hit the subscribe button already do that now we got many more cool informative videos to come thanks for watching

Channel: Car Wizard

Views: 1,158,900

Keywords: car wizard, david long, hoovies garage, tyler hoover, car issues with tyler hoover, omega auto clinic, scotty kilmer, car repair, car maintenance, tavarish, Doug DeMuro, samcrac, vinwiki, Hoovie, mechanic, Car issues, BendPak, ac, air conditioning, hot car, compressor, condensor

Id: bVYUzp8QQ0M

Length: 18min 55sec (1135 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 02 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/roger-the-adequit]

Well done Car Wizard!