How To Find An A/C Leak Using Shop Air

what's going on guys and welcome back to the channel today we're doing something a little bit different I'm standing here in front of the WRX and the AC is not working in it so we're gonna go ahead and dive into what's going on so once we got the car all put back together and I got it on the road I didn't charge it right away because really it wasn't it wasn't too hot out I wasn't using it so I just never never got around to it but over the past probably two weeks or so it's been pretty hot here so the other day at work I went ahead and I charged it and I went to get in the car I started it up and I had no compressor clutch engagement so you know a/c wasn't working I didn't really have time to mess with it so I just kind of said whatever you know I'll get to it another day so this morning I had to run to the parts store and yeah that's a pretty hot day today so I get in it and I'm like you know what I'm gonna you know see what's going on you know maybe it's something simple it turns out that I had actually left my a/c pressure switch unplugged so I had had it I had an unplugged and I had the line tucked out of my way when I was working in here and when I put it all back together I just never plugged it in I'm like oh cool you know I I'll plug it in everything should be fine so I plug it in get in the car started up nothing still wasn't working so I'm like okay so let's see what's going on so I go in and I grab my AC gauges that I had in the garage here I hooked them up and I had no pressure had nothing in the system so at this point you know I figure obviously I've got a leak because I just charged it and I was like two or three days ago and it was you know it was full and we have nothing now so obviously we have a leak so what I want to do is I want to show you guys how to check for an a/c leak with basically just some cheap gauges these are snap-on gauges that I bought your ago I probably way overpaid for them but you can pick these gauges up at Harbor Freight for like 50 bucks somewhere around there you can buy them on Amazon you don't have to buy an expensive set of gauges they all do the same thing so yeah all you really need to do this like I said is a set of cheap gauges I have a couple dollars worth of air fittings and an air compressor and an airline and what we're gonna do is we're actually going to feed shop air into the system which you know a lot of people say that this isn't a good way to check for a leak because you're introducing you know air into the system which if the system is empty you're it's gonna have air in it anyways so I've been using this method for a long time and it works great I've never had any issues so we're gonna go ahead and do that now alright guys so all I've got here is set of gauges I got them hooked up to the car and I took my service fit my service line off most of these gauges they come with a yellow service fitting that you can hook up to a vacuum pump or you can hook it up to a bottle to charge the car I just went ahead and took that off and I just have some adapters on here these are just some fittings that I picked up a tractor supply and they're just like this is a female adapter and then I have a ball valve and just an air fitting and all I'm gonna do is I'm gonna hook up my shop air to here which is going to pressurize the system as you can see we got 0 pounds of pressure in the system right now it's going to pressurize the system and then what I'm gonna do is I'm going to spray some soapy water all around the system you know over my fittings and you know my connections and stuff and see if we can find our leak I suspect that I have a leak somewhere in probably in the condenser area maybe one of my fittings is leaking sometimes as a rings don't seal right but we'll see what happens all right so all we're gonna do I have my ball valve closed I'm gonna go ahead and hook up my airline and then I'm just gonna slowly crack it open because if there is a major leak you know you're just gonna have air rushing out all over the place so we're just going to slowly open it see my pressures start going up now my fitting is leaking a little bit here but that's not a big deal open it up we got about a hundred psi I'm gonna close the ball valve take my line off now the system is pressurized and we can go ahead and check for leaks all right so all I have here is just some soapy water and we're gonna do is we're going to spray this around you know all of our connections our fittings things like that and we're gonna look for bubbles which would indicate obviously a leak [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] haha where's our leak [Applause] kind of as I suspected we've got a leak at our connection where this line comes down attaches at the condenser and then it's also leaking up here at the compressor not as bad it's about that's the only leak that I see everything else looks good alright guys so that is our leak or at least one of our leaks I should say this is the connection on the side of the condenser you know there's just an o-ring inside of it seals that sometimes those earrings don't seal up right I don't think I replace them whenever I put it back together which you always should any time you take a any AC line off or any connection you should always replace the seals but as you can see spray that you can see it's leaking pretty good we have another smaller leak on top of the compressor this one's not nearly as bad but you can kind of see the air bubbles coming out of the side of there we're gonna go ahead and just this is actually the same line this line runs from the compressor it goes down to the condenser and so we're just gonna go ahead and remove this line and replace those rings now I will say once you once you do this you know once you replace the o-rings you don't want to just go ahead and charge it you do want to hook it up to a vacuum pump or you know if you have an AC machine you want to run a at least a 30-minute vacuum on it and that will evacuate any type of moisture or air in the system before you charge it alright guys so that's going to wrap this video up let me know in the comments down below if you like this video or if you want to see more videos like this I may in the future do some shorter you know kind of how-to videos some quick tips things like that to kind of fill in you know in between some of our bigger build projects but yeah I mean this was a you know this is something that you know anybody can do instead of you know 50 40 50 dollar gauges a few fittings you know anybody can do this you know as long as you have an air compressor so yeah just let me know what you guys think if you want to see more of these videos in the future don't forget to Like share subscribe until next time pues [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Built By Sonick

Views: 15,514

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Id: IecsX878Ttg

Length: 9min 29sec (569 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 29 2020