How To Add Refrigerant To Air Conditioner

hey guys J here with word of advice TV I'm at a friend's place right now and he's been saying that his AC has been working all day long but it's not keeping up the temperature just keeps climbing up it's doing a little bit of cooling but not enough so last year he had refrigerant added to his unit my guess is that it's probably low again it leaked out during the winter so I'm making this video because I want to show you the process of how to add refrigerant to a unit and since he's gonna be replacing this this is only a short-term type of deal just to get him by I'm not gonna be taking all those measurements like super heat and sub cooling weighing my tank and all of that type of stuff the wet bulb I'm just gonna simply recharge it and a lot of you have been asking me what's the normal or average pressures of an AR 22 unit while it's running on a semi hot day or a hot day so I'm gonna go ahead and recharge this guy and let you see what the process looks like and as you can see right here notice this block of frost and ice if you're seeing ice buildup right here that means the a coil or the evaporator coil inside is completely frozen over so the first thing I'm gonna do is turn off the power to this thing I don't want the compressor to be running so that turns off the AC outside the fan inside continues to run and what I'm gonna do because I don't want to be here for too long I'm gonna turn the furnace on and actually thought that a coil out speed that process up so I'm not stuck here for a couple hours just waiting for this tooth out and I don't know if you're gonna be able to see this but the suction line the thicker copper pipe is frozen all the way up to the compressor if you look from up above that pipe that's supposed to be copper there's actually all white yeah camera is not focusing too well through the grates I'm just gonna have to take my word for it well anyway let's go inside and see if that coil is accessible maybe we can take a look at what it looks like unfortunately there's no easy access to the a coil so I won't be able to show you the big block of ice but I'm very confident that inside of here that coil is just completely frozen and there's some water trickling down right here just running down the side right there you just saw drop there's another drop so it's starting to slowly thout but this is probably going to take a good 20 minutes with the furnace on well maybe not 20 10 minutes let's say without the furnace on it could take like half a day or a day to complete without that ice takes a really long time to thaw and keep in mind when that coil is thawing out a lot of that is not gonna go down the drain it's actually gonna run down the side of the ductwork and into the furnace and on the floor so it's probably gonna be a big puddle on the floor and maybe we can come back and film that if that's gonna be the case or maybe it's just gonna pull up in the bottom of the furnace so anyway first thing I want to do before I add refrigerant is completely thaw this guy out and then add some refrigerant otherwise my pressures are gonna be messed up and I'm not gonna put an actor in charge in there so let's go turn our furnace on and while we're waiting for the evaporator to thaw out I'm gonna go ahead and hook up my hoses how does it get the caps off I like to put them right next to the valve ports so I don't lose the caps so the red hose will go on the high side which is the thin copper line I won't be using my clamp for this like I said this is a temporary fix we just want to make this thing work so it lasts of a week or two and once he gets a new unit this will obviously no longer be a problem okay and then the blue hose will go on the suction line or the thicker line like that and let's see what pressures we got so we're on our 22 which is the green scale we're at about 55 psi on the low side and about the same on the high side and if you look at the nameplate let's see factory charged ounces are twenty to a hundred nine ounces so our refrigerant is r22 and basically as that evaporator coil is thawing out we should see these pressures climbing up so once in a while I'll fill my gauges just so we can see the pressures going up so the furnace has been running for about five minutes or so and you can just see all that water - coming down the drain that block of ice on the a coil is dying out and a ton of water is coming out and like I said not all of it is going down the drain there's a little puddle forming here and a lot of it is probably gonna end up on the floor over there so the furnace has been running for about ten minutes now and as you can see the pressures are going up I think we're slowly getting there and if you're not sure if that coil is totally thought out or not I would just say wait longer it's a lot better to wait too long than not wait long enough because if there's still ice on that coil and you start adding refrigerant to this thing then you're probably gonna end up overcharging the unit because when it's frozen chances are your pressures aren't going to be going up or at least not nearly as fast especially on the low side here and since I'm not gonna be visually checking the a coil on this one to make sure that it's completely thought out I'm just going to give it some extra time maybe about 20 minutes to completely thaw out and then we are ready to turn the AC back on and charge this unit up okay so it's been about 20 minutes now I turned the furnace off and as you can see there's no more water coming down to condensate drain hose which to me would seem like the a coil is finally done thawing out there's no more moisture coming out and surprisingly most of it did go down the drain just this little puddle here and probably a little bit of water on the bottom of the furnace but it wasn't a ton like it sometimes is because there is no water in the bottom of the furnace which is good okay so the pressure's got to about a hundred psi on both the low side gauge and the high side gauge which is normal with the unit that's low in charge usually when the pressures equalized are about 120 to 130 psi if the charge is how it should be so now that it's completely thought out I can hook up my refrigerant tank and by the way I turned my breaker on on the connect and the power saver switch immediately shut the unit off after it came on for like half a second and it's gonna be off for about I don't know five ten minutes sometimes fifteen depending on what this thing is set to so we're gonna have to wait for that before it turns on and while we wait I'll hook up my refrigerant tank and dealing with refrigerants is not typically a DIY type of thing so this kind of thing really only HVAC technicians should be handling refrigerant and you should be licensed to be able to do that just throwing that out there is a warning once you got the hoses all on yellow hose goes to the tank and like I said I'm not gonna be weighing my tank this is for a friend so I'm not gonna be charging him I got all three hoses hooked up next I want to purge my hoses because air and moisture is not good for any system this one I can't purge it because I don't have the tank open let's go ahead and open that up if the tank is tilted up with these handles towards the top you're gonna have vapor coming out if you flip the tank upside down you're gonna have liquid refrigerant coming out and you should only add r22 in the vapor form you could do it in liquid but you risk slugging the compressor so it's not recommended typically all of us will add refrigerant in the vapor form with the tank right side up so I got it open purge the middle one let's purge the red hose okay that should have gotten all the air out of the hoses and now we just wait for the unit to turn on and we can start adding charge and in order to add charge unless it's a new install to add refrigerant the unit does need to be running so when the unit is running then you can add the charge and while we're waiting for it to start normal pressures let's say it's 90 degrees outside normal pressures on our 22 system for the low side would be about right over here so about 80 psi look at that that unit turned on this is perfect typically from what I see all the time if a unit is freezing over which this one is it's going to be about 30 to 45 psi on the low side and for the high side it's going to be around 150 psi and you don't want to let it run too long because it starts to freeze over pretty quick so I already have my hoses purged everything's connected I'm going to go ahead and start adding refrigerant refrigerant is always added through the suction side through the low side you never want to add anything or try to add anything through the discharge so I'm gonna go ahead and open that up and just let that in usually you would do this with the refrigerant tank on a scale or in a fish scale so you can monitor how much you're putting in as you're putting refrigerant in if you don't see your high side slowly crawling up that's typically a bad sign that means either something's still frozen or you have other problems besides your unit just being low in charge so after I leave this open for 15-20 seconds I like to close it up see where we're at and this is a bigger unit it has a lot of refrigerant in it so I'm probably gonna have to put in a good to three pounds so I'll just open that back up and leave it open for about 30 seconds before we check it again and what I'm aiming for the unit turned on and interrupted me but what we're looking for is about if you look on the green scale that's the r22 temperature saturation temperature scale what we're looking for if it's a really hot day this should be about 45 degrees and if it's a really you know normal day let's say it's like 75 80 it should be around 40 degrees which translates to about 70 75 psi if it gets hot like I said like 90 95 degrees then you're probably going to be closer to 80 85 psi so I'll shut that again see where we're at we already climbed up to 55 psi and our target is going to be about 75 psi and I'm gonna go ahead and put my thermometer right over here just to see what the temperature outside is like or I can put it no you don't want to put it on top because it's rejecting the hot air from the top I'll put it on the side we're sucking air in just to see what the temperature outside is we're in the shade right now so it shouldn't be too hot so basically it's about eighty degrees outside which means we're going to want to get to about 70 psi which is going to be around the 40 degree saturation temperature point and once again this is just the average or the ballpark because this is not a permanent fix normally you would want to do this with superheat and subcooling measurements [Music] let's close it up again all we're getting really close we're at about right about 65 psi right now so just a little bit more to put in and as I was saying earlier if it gets up to like 32 degrees and the saturation temperature or about 55 60 psi and it stops going up then that coil inside the evaporator coil is probably still frozen at that point definitely stop adding everything and make sure that thing is thought out before you continue so let's go ahead and add some more so we're at about 40 degrees saturation temperature and that's about 70 psi that's pretty good I'm gonna go ahead and add just a little bit more and as you're adding refrigerant as there's more pressure in the unit itself the pressure going into it decreases that's why you saw the arrow you know it started out here but it went down over here that's the normal occurrence my high side is going up normally as well usually the high side is going to be about somewhere from 225 to 250 psi that's a normal reading on an average hot day for an R 22 system so I think that's plenty we're just at about 70 psi and I think that's all I'm gonna add so I'm going to go ahead and close the tank and then what I like to do is take off the high side first which is the discharge line and actually you should be doing this with gloves on but I forgot to bring my gloves today because if the refrigerant starts squirting out it could frostbite you pretty quick I have low loss fittings so there's not a lot that squirts out so I should be fine that's what I like about low loss fittings it was just a brief quick spurt whereas if it was normal fittings like this then it would have sprayed me pretty good for probably like a second or two so I got that off I put it back on my manifold then I go ahead and open up this side after I have the holes put background on the manifold I have this closed I put this side on or open up the valve this is already closed and then I go ahead and purge any air that might be in there just a little bit ah I don't like when oil spurts out of there but it is what it is and then what I like to do is all the refrigerant that's left in this hole in these hoses right here I like to open up my low side and just let that back into the unit it's about one or two ounces that you put back in so once that's back in you can take off the low-side hose as well and that is it that is the quick process of recharging a unit and once again this is the beer can cold method this is not the proper method just pointing that out I know I'm probably going to get some flack for this from the HVAC technicians that are watching this maybe later on I'll make a proper video with all the measurements the superheat and subcooling wet bulbs and all of that make another video on that and optimally after you're done just like a can of beer the suction line should be sweating this one's insulated so you can't see much of it but it is sweating right here and that's a good sign that means it's properly charged and of course don't forget to put the caps back on okay and before I leave I like to just double check the temperatures make sure that we have a good temperature drop should be about 15 to 20 degrees so one temperature I'm gonna grab at the return leave that in there for a little bit it doesn't have to be extremely precise so basically it's about 73 degrees on the return side so it should be 15 to 20 degrees lower on the supply side so I'm gonna go ahead poke my thermometer into here let's see what we got under on the supply side and if you get a measurement that's ah let's say it's only 12 degrees that might still be okay what I would do is try poking on the other side just try a few different spots because sometimes there's like a little dead spot wherever you poked it in there's not a lot of airflow just try a few different spots to see what temperatures are getting in different spots even if I move it right now I'll say it's 59 let's see if I move the thermometer this way look at that it was at 59 now dropped to 58 so 73 minus 58 that's exactly 15 degrees and as as this thing continues to run this will get lower and lower so like I said should be about 15 to 20 degrees on average okay so it's been a couple of days since I recharged my friend's AC unit I was in a little bit of a rush so I didn't get to film the ending there but here I am now my friend let me know a couple days later that his AC is running cool and crisp and better than ever it's not running nearly as long as it used to which is great timing because this whole week most of the days were 90 to 100 degrees I hope you found this video useful and even though I did not use the proper method of recharging the air conditioner hopefully you still got some good takeaways from this video later on I do hope to make a video of all the proper procedures and all the measurements and how to do all that and maybe I'll use a phone app to make sure that I put in the accurate precise charge but anyway thank you so much for watching this video until the very end don't forget to mash that like button on the way out and I'll see you next time and if you're still here and not in the comments section below 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Channel: Word of Advice TV

Views: 1,587,248

Keywords: How To Add Refrigerant To Air Conditioner, how to add freon to air conditioner, how to add refrigerant to ac, how to add refrigerant to home ac, how to add refrigerant to home air conditioner, how to add R22 to air conditioner, how to add R22, how to add refrigerant, how to charge r22 unit, how to refill ac charge, how to refill refrigerant in ac, air conditioner refrigerant recharge, ac unit low on charge, ac low on refrigerant, air conditioner low on freon, word of advice tv

Id: T2s38Dg8s4g

Length: 22min 8sec (1328 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 14 2020