How to Find AC Refrigerant Leaks in Your Car (UV Dye) - HVAC

in this video i'll show you how to find refrigerant leaks in your car or truck using ac uv dye which is this little bottle right here i'll also talk about a couple of other methods you can use to detect refrigerant leaks also so let's get started so one very important thing to note is that ac systems are closed systems that means you should never drop the pressure out of spec throughout its life as an ac system if you have a drop in pressure usually and you know 9.999 times out of 10 you have a refrigerant leak and it needs to be addressed the tiniest leak whether it's pinhole sized or a huge rupture in an ac line they're both just as important as each other really you should never have a drop in pressure the thing is ac systems moisture and contaminants really kill these systems the last thing you want is your compressor to fail inside the ac system this pag oil which runs throughout the system it's designed to lubricate the compressor and any you know moving parts the thing is when water and contaminants get into the oil it can you know generate more heat in the compressor and you know it's just a matter of time before something fails if something like a compressor fails it sends tiny metal metal metal particles throughout the whole system and can actually get clogged up in the condenser and ruin parts you wouldn't otherwise need to replace so something like a small leak is better addressed right away just do not hold off on things like this so for uv dye leak detection you don't really need much stuff you need a small bottle of uv dye right here but you may also have dye in your system which i'll show you how to find out very soon you'll need a uv light and this will help you actually see the leaks and also optionally depends how big the leak is some yellow glasses here this enhances what you see so if it's a really small leak i highly recommend these if it's a large leak it'll be easy to spot without these glasses and lastly you need a way to actually get the refrigerant and die into the system i have some ac manifold gauges here but you can use a standard kind of refrigerant with end and just fill on the low side here so this is somewhat optional but you will need a way to get this die into the system and for me i have manifold gauges for you you can use this or refrigerant mixed with the dye which comes in a can ready to go so if you don't have a set of ac manifold gauges you can get something like this which is the refrigerant mixed with the uv dye and it comes with a dispenser right there so you can refill it on the low side so before we get started with the uv dye method let me talk about a couple of other methods you can use to find refrigerant leaks so there's something called a refrigerant leak detector you can get them really cheap for around 70 80 but they can go up to a few hundred dollars what it is is a small device that sits in your hand and it's got a wand and it just detects refrigerant in the air that's really all it does now these are useful for a couple of reasons one just for detecting leaks now freon is around four times heavier than air so it will just sink underneath the car so when actually doing checks for this always go under the car because it sits down here and when it detects a refrigerant leak it'll just beep and you can sort of see the levels it detects in a good one anyway now the pitfalls for this is that well the uv dye method is a lot cheaper and a lot easier in my opinion to actually see the leaks which we'll get onto shortly however it does have its benefits when having leaks in the evaporator now the evaporator is a part of the ac system that sits between the passenger compartment and the engine bay here so between the firewall and the passenger compartment you can't actually see it visibly without removing some of the dash components in the car now with a leak detector you can actually wand the passenger flooring to detect leaks there without actually removing anything so that has its benefits here however if you find the leak without even having to go in there then you know it might be a step you don't need to do anyway so i'm just telling you what exists so you can look at your options and think about them now if you're doing any kind of ac work and you have to evacuate the system to recharge it then you'll probably own a vacuum pump if not i'll link it in the description below i also have many other videos on ac work explaining and basics what ac is how to evacuate your system again i'll link those below too the purpose of this video is just to talk about the uv dye and how to handle that so i will skip some you know some steps with the pump and things like that but not to worry with a pump when you evacuate your system you pull a vacuum on it and that boils all the moisture out the system before you can recharge it again for ac use now what happens is when you pull a vacuum you're creating negative pressure in all these ac lines here if you leave the pump attached for a few hours or even overnight it'll actually have a negative pressure here and it sits around 30 right here and if it doesn't sit around 30 on the gauges here then you know you have a leak it doesn't tell you where the leak is but you know you actually have a leak so it is something to consider anyway so that's just another method it doesn't tell you where but it tells you if you have one so now we've discussed some methods of leak detection let's proceed with the uv dilate detection now depending on your circumstances you may already have uv dye in your system this is up to the manufacture of the vehicle so it depends on the year maker model you can look it up in the service manual or you can actually test yourself relatively easy so in my case here i have a very small leak it's actually holding pressure but if i try and recharge it with a refrigerant it'll leak out to you know around 30 psi and stop leaking so i know it's going to be the tiniest leak here so in my case i do have some pressure in the system and what i can do is just tap this shroud valve and check for the presence of dye so in this instance it's just a case of tapping this strada valve on the low side port here just tiny i'll actually show you under a uv light so you can see a lot better and just checking for residual uv dye around this area here if it actually luminesces uh under uv light then it's safe to say you already have dye in the system so if you have a low side port that looks something a little like that then good chances are you might have some dye in this system you see how it's luminescing it's quite hard to see with the camera but that's a good indication you already have some sort of dye in the system so as you could see under the uv light there that's what it looks like if you have dye already in the system it's quite easy to check so even if you have no charge in the system you will still have pag oil which is designed to lube the compressor and it actually gets carried around the whole ac system with the refrigerant now the dye itself actually mixes with the pag oil and takes it around the system so even how even though you have no refrigerant charge you will still have some residual dye in the system just if you're wondering about that so let's talk about the dye itself now i have a set of ac manifold gauges so adding straight dye is really easy for me i'm just going to suck it in with a bit of refrigerant job done now if you don't have the ac manifold gauges here you can get that can which has the die pre-added you can just add it in on the low side port it's not a problem so if purchasing straight uv die like this one here this is a one ounce bottle you only need to add a quarter of an ounce that's all you need to do when adding diet to ac systems if you add more than a quarter of an ounce it can actually adversely affect cooling and your system as a whole so when adding this make sure it's only around a quarter of an ounce also make sure it's compatible with your refrigerant type on this car it's r134a and lastly you can get these for oil coolant on all kinds of different liquids but make sure it's actually 4ac as well so before you do anything at all what i like to do is actually check the system you can do this at night time with the glasses if you already have the die in or you can just do a check in the day the thing is you don't really want to put die input effort into you know partially charging the system and the leak is really easy to spot that's the last thing you want to do so a common area of leaks are these low and high side ports here where the shrouder valve is failed here so these are very common there's a low side here this is a satin view but you know your circumstances or configuration may be different but the principles the same and there's the high side shrouder valve there so they're common for leaking so with a little bit of charge there and maybe a bottle of soapy water you can identify leaks quite easily in these valves right here so now you check the shroud of valves just check all the ac lines here just for nicks or where they've been rubbing against anything another common one is o-rings and washers and gaskets that actually hold the ac lines together follow it all the way down all around the system so this is the low side literally follow the pipe all the way along as far as you can check for every single fitting you can see where it joins onto rubber here it's coming to get leaks right here follow it all the way along where it goes to the evaporator in the car all the way out on the high side just follow all the lines just check for anything obvious because um you know we may not even need to do this ac dye step check the condenser at the front what can happen is rocks can fling up and you know hit things on your condenser which is right inside here now this is a lot easier to see under uv dye but you know it's just something you might be able to visually check first and coming out of the condenser back onto the low side here and we also have a receiver dryer behind the headlight here so check the fittings on that it's quite hard to see but uh under a uv light at night time you can actually see an ac line through there but yeah under uv light and with some darkness you can identify a leak through this crack it'll glow quite brightly so now we've done like a dry run over it we can't really find the leak let's get to adding the uv dye so we can actually try and find this what could be a tiny leak one of the last steps you should do before actually adding the uv dye or refrigerant mix with the dye is to actually remove residual dye or anything like that with brake parts cleaner now the last thing you want is a false diagnosis say you already have dye in the system and it's uh you know pulling up below the compressor or something like that it could be an old leak maybe someone fixed it ages ago or maybe it's leaked down from something else so it's always good to start with a clean canvas go around the whole ac system use your uv light at night time with the brake parts clean and clean up any uv dye that you see when we add our uv dye into the system we want to make sure that any uv dye outside of the system is through a leak that we did and it's nothing old or nothing confusing with an old job or anything like that so that's why the brake parts cleaner is a really good step just so we start with a clean canvas so i'm going to add the uv die into the system here if you're not familiar with recharging a system or anything like that i'll link the videos in the description below i've done this before even on this exact car so it'll be easy to follow along so with the ac manifold gauges here adding the die is relatively easy we can just add it into this refill port here so literally just pour a quarter of an ounce into this hole right here and that will sit in the line right here then we're going to connect it to the refrigerant can we're going to purge the yellow line and then we're going to refill it by opening the low side valve through the low side port right here so on this bottle here we can easily see how much a quarter of an ounce is so we're just going to run it down to this line right here when adding the uv dye it might be easy just to crack this line right here that way when we add the dye the air can escape and it's just not pulling in the top of the refill line so we've added our quarter ounce here you can see right in there so now we're going to connect our kind of refrigerant onto the end of the refill port so we've attached our refrigerant can to the end of the refill hose here and we've also got our die in the hose itself so we're just going to purge the air using the schroder valve because we don't want air in the system we're going to use safety glasses we might as well use these we have them and also avoid breathing in refrigerant that's the last thing you want to do it's really not good for you and again if you don't have the can and manifold gauge set you can just use the the refrigerant with the dye pre-added and add it in the low side port so that's what we're gonna do now so when purging the air not refilling purging it's easy to hold it upside down here that way we get the liquid refrigerant coming out here if you tend to have it upwards like this then you'll get air coming out of here and you don't know if it's the uh refrigerant um in a gaseous state or the you know actual air from the line so a little tip there so when purging this because it has the dye into it very carefully very calmly don't just jam it in otherwise you'll get a nice uv die shower now the line's purged let's just recharge the system with the die so adding the uv dye it has to circulate throughout the whole system you can't just put it in the low side port with the compressor clutch not running and it just pulls there in one spot ac dye will pull in one spot you need to send it throughout the system which means we need to run the ac on this vehicle to run the ac on any vehicle the compressor needs to be running and the clutch needs to be engaged if you're not familiar with the compressor and clutch again check out our other videos it's all in the compressor real quick is down here so the compressor is right here the clutch is this front piece here this needs to be engaged so when we press ac in our passenger cabin the clutch is running and it's actually cycling the uv dye throughout the system so when adding the uv dye let the ac run five ten minutes the longer really the better but you also do not want to run this compressor with a low charge it can damaging it especially when jumping a compressor relay now if you're trying to add this refrigerant and die into this system and your compressor clutch won't engage well i have a video on it that exact thing i'll link it in the description below it's basically jumping a relay something like that in order to force it to run but you do not want to do this for a long period of time so now we're going to add our uv dye into this system we've connected all our gauges we've opened up all the valves on the low and also the high side of the ac system we want the dye to circulate all the way through the high and low side so we can detect for leaks both in the low and high side and pretty much anywhere in the ac system so we're going to leave this running for a few minutes we have our can connected in the upright position we don't want to refill it like that otherwise we're drawing liquid refrigerant straight into the compressor which is the next stop along from our low side refill port we don't want liquid refrigerant going into the compressor it can slug it i've never seen it firsthand it's something which is talked about but you know you don't want to take any risks you can fill it like that just fine so we have our manifold gauges set these readings aren't accurate because the vehicle is not started and the compressor clutch is not engaged so ignore these readings for now we're going to start the vehicle we're going to put it on max 80. so i've just started the vehicle now we're going to put it on ac max ac so all the way up engage the ac there we can see our compressor clutch isn't running so we're going to jump the relay on that we're gonna open up our low side valve here that way we can draw the refrigerant into the system and now we're gonna have to jump the compressor clutch to actually get a reading and draw refrigerant into the system so let's jump the compressor clutch we should also jump these cooling fans in an ideal world here the last thing we want to do is overheat the condenser so there's the clutch engaged so it's now running so you can see now the compressor clutch is engaged here we're getting more normal readings here this looks a lot more normal it's maybe a slightly slow charge but i think this is a good indicator of how big the leak is so on my system here it's very tiny and you can see through the looking glass here the uv dye is slowly working its way into the system when removing the low side coupling from adding the uv dye just clean up any residual uv dye here to prevent a false diagnosis so it's night time as you can see the best time of the day to check for leaks in the ac system let's get to it so we're going to put on our uv enhancing glasses and we're gonna get our uv light here and see if we can find the leak again the enhancing glasses they're not really necessary unless the leak is really small it really shows up well you can you know perfectly see a leak without the glasses but it does help so just like we did before we're going to follow the ac line here all the way around the car we did it in the daytime earlier in the video so it's pretty much the same again at night time so start with the low side and work it all the way along so follow the pipe all the way along all the way at the back which goes into the evaporator check every single thing i'm not going to go through it all on the video but you know you get the general idea don't forget to get the caps off as well make sure the uh shredder valves in here aren't leaking that's the most common sign really of leaking there just a leaky shroud of valve follow it all the way along all around the condenser the best way you can so you know through the uh through the rail here again check absolutely everything on this condenser because rocks come up and you know nick it it's really common symptom uh go underneath the car check absolutely everything but um i did look a little early and it looks like this is the corporate right here this coupling here so right this right here you can see just in there you can see that the tiniest leak very tiny and that would just be an o-ring or something like that something very small you know a very small leak can bring down a whole ac system and again we need to diagnose this now before anything else goes uh goes wrong here you can see on the other side of the coupling as well it's all the way around so it looks like the o-ring is pretty much gone in there so that's what we will be uh replacing here um just because you found one tiny leak check the whole system it might be multiple leaks you know you never know if it's an old car with lots of miles on all the o-rings might be going out at once so it could be a good opportunity to replace them all it really depends so back in the daytime now so we've identified the leak in this particular system here which is this coupling right here so what you can do with that is actually buy an o-ring and gasket set and that covers everything for the whole vehicle all the connections includes the o-rings and also the um washers as well which are special washers they're sort of like a metal ring with a rubber on the inside and they usually couple uh the pipes here to the compressor and things like that so when you do buy something like an o-ring kit it'll include everything you need for the whole system so depending where your leak is you know it might be a different problem it could be damage in the line here in which you would unbolt this section of the line and back here and replace the whole you know segment of ac line you know that could happen as well it could be the condenser maybe a rock chipped up and damaged some of the fins and you need to replace the condenser there so you know it does vary and i can't really give all the possible advice and solutions for each particular problem but this is a good indication on how you actually detect ac leaks if you can't actually find the leak at all you've looked around the whole system and it's just leaking out then you may want to check the evaporator back there it's pretty much the only component you can't see because it lives behind the dash and behind the firewall in there so that's a good point of contact if you have you know like a major leak and you just can't find out where it's coming from so i would suspect the evaporator uh back there so once you've repaired your system you'll need to pull a vacuum get rid of all the contaminants perhaps replace the receiver dryer as well and then recharge the system i have videos on how to do this i'll link them all in the description below so you can check those out and get your car back on the road with a nice ice cold ac so i hope this video helped you and thanks for watching

Channel: TutorialGenius.com

Views: 58,022

Keywords: ac, ac leak, ac leak detection, ac leak uv dye, ac refrigerant leaks, adding uv dye, air conditioner leak, air conditioning, aircon, aircon leak, aircon leak detection, car, car ac, dye, finding an ac leak, fluorescent dye, hot ac, how to, how to find ac leaks in your car, how to find an ac leak, how to find an aircon leak, hvac, ice cold ac, leaks, r1234yf, r134a, refrigerant, refrigerant leak, refrigerant leaks, saturn vue, system leak, uv, uv dye, warm ac

Id: 9j9MgxNwZxI

Length: 20min 58sec (1258 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 25 2021