How To Add Freon / Refrigerant To Your Air Conditioner

in today's video we're going to show you how to charge an AC system that is low on refrigerant I'm going to show you a couple of reasons why you can tell it's low on refrigerant and then we'll move on to how to actually charge the system this will apply for R22 as well as r410a so let's get right into it alright so this is the system that we're working with it's an old Linux R22 system again this will apply for R22 or 410A we have our recovery tank this is a friend of mine's house so we're using recovered refrigerant if you're using brand new refrigerant it'll be in a green container for R22 and it'll be in like a pink container I believe for 410A so you have options on the gauges that you choose to use normally in my past videos you've seen me using the regular needle gauges and those are totally fine this is a little bit more sophisticated setup but really the biggest thing with your gauges is going to be the hoses so if you're shopping for a set of gauges manifold and gauges definitely spend the few extra dollars on these These are about a hundred dollars for the low loss fittings I'll show you in just a second how easy these hoses are to install so I'm going to show you two different ways of doing this some people are called a two pound technician because they don't have any of these items they simply put in enough refrigerant to where they think it's okay another term is called beer can cold if this line is beer can cold then you're probably good so I'm going to show you two methods the first is doing it without superheat and sub cooling and the second mess it is a lot more dialed in with super heat and getting it really dialed in so blue is your low side this hose is going to go to the larger Line This is called the suction line or the low side as well but notice when I tighten this we'll do it quickly here we only let out a very minimal amount of refrigerant and when we go to take that off it'll do the same it'll only let out a certain amount of refrigerant now I'm not going to do that right now but towards the end of the video I'll show just how little refrigerant comes out so next we're going to take our high side hose same thing okay so the first thing that we're going to want to do is go inside and we're going to turn the thermostat on we're going to make sure that this unit has run for about 10 minutes before we add the refrigerant so that we can check the pressures beforehand so I'm going to go ahead and bump this on and we're going to let this run for 10 minutes and then we're going to check our pressures now a couple of things that are good telltale signs that you are low on refrigerant is one this line right here the larger line could be Frozen and the evaporator coil inside could actually be frozen those are good indicators that either you have a restriction in your air filter or you have low refrigerant so for an R22 system just to give you an idea on maybe an 80 90 degree day our low pressure side should be about 60 to 80 psi on the low side and the high side should be somewhere around 150 175 somewhere in that area so as long as we're within that area and that pipe is nice and cold you're probably going to be okay but then we're going to show you not only how to do that but how to check the superheat with our thermometer and our temperature clamps as well all right so let's say we just have a regular set of gauges no clamps um we're just doing this very basic R22 charge up now this system has been running for 10 minutes we grab this line it's not super duper cold that would indicate that we need to top off the system that line should be like I said beer can cold for a very basic understanding of it now what we're going to do is we're going to take the middle line the yellow one and we're going to hook it up to the liquid side of our tank now this is a recovery tank if you were charging a system with a brand new R22 tank in order to get liquid we would need to flip this tank upside down what we're going to do is make sure that these are closed we're going to open the liquid side of the tank there's a tube that goes down making sure that we're getting liquid out of this tank and now what we're going to do is we're just going to purge our line let a little bit of refrigerant out doesn't take much we just don't want to be introducing any air into the system so now that our air has been purged out of that line this line is open all we're going to do is we're going to slowly start feeding in refrigerant and you'll notice you can notice the compressor change tone and the little sight glass you can see liquid being fed in now you don't want to do this super fast just let a little bit in at a time and then close it let it sit for maybe five minutes and then recheck and see how cold this line is and again the pressure that we're after is about 75 PSI on a pretty warm day so that's kind of our Target we're sitting at about 60 right now so we're going to let that stabilize and then add this as needed now in order to do this the professional way we need to determine if we have a piston or a TXV for our metering device because that will determine if we're checking superheat or sub cooling now this is a piston system so we're going to be checking superheat if it was a TXV then we would be checking sub cooling now in order to check the superheat since we know that this system has a piston we need to take a few measurements number one is the indoor wet bulb temperature now there's a couple methods that you can do this uh the way that I did it was with the use of this tool this is a field piece pocket cyclometer this tells us our wet bulb the other option that you can do you can take this and you can wrap a wet towel around it and put it in front of your return and that will give you your wet bulb temperature as well but once you have that measurement you use it in conjunction with the outdoor temperature and that will give you your target superheat as you can see we're sitting right at about 58 degrees and then we'll plug that into our chart and see what we've got oh guys as you can see we're sitting at about five 0.6 superheat that's exactly where we want it so this system is properly charged we have nice heat coming out of the top now and we have a super cold suction line so that's exactly what we're after hopefully this has saved you hundreds of dollars being able to do this yourself especially with R22 this stuff most technicians will charge up to 200 to 300 per pound of R22 refrigerant so being able to know this can save you so much money here's a tip when it comes to removing your gauges I'm going to go ahead and flip the breaker off for our condensing unit and you'll notice what happens here the high side will start to drop and the low side will start to raise until we get to whatever pressure this equalizes at then we can go ahead and disconnect our two lines and this line will be less hard to remove because if you try to take this off while it's under pressure it'll it'll have a lot of pressure when you go to unthread that fitting all right so we've just about equalized here we're going to go ahead and remove the low side see how quick and easy that was next we'll remove the high side and it should be about the same just like that that is the beauty of these low loss fittings they're super Compact and they're very easy to install and remove perfect for your average diy-er or someone who is getting in this field well I hope you guys found this video helpful if so make sure and leave it a like and consider subscribing to our Channel if you'd like to see how you can save hundreds of dollars by maintaining your condensing unit how the proper procedure of cleaning it what's involved check out this video right here and we're going to show you how to do that and save hundreds of dollars until next time you guys be safe later

Channel: The DIY HVAC Guy

Views: 273,154

Keywords: acservicetech, hvac, hvac contractors, hvac contractor tactics, bad hvac contractors, hvac shiesty contractors, hvac contractor hacks, ac secrets, r22, r-22, r410a, diy hvac guy, anti diy hvac, quality hvac, how to charge ac, how to refill r22 air conditioner, hvac business, air conditioner repair, freon, refrigerant, refrigeration, heating and air conditioning, hvac repair, hvac training videos

Id: J1s4wxDBe24

Length: 8min 59sec (539 seconds)

Published: Wed May 03 2023