How To Find and Repair AC Leaks - EricTheCarGuy

hello viewer for those of you that have been watching eric the car guy for a while you know that i tried to avoid making videos about AC work i avoid this for a number of reasons mainly because AC involves more than you suspect i mean you think you know something about AC but no AC involves several different disciplines one you have to know how the system works in the pressure temperature differential also there's some electrical things that could be involved there's some mechanical things that could be involved so there's a lot of different disciplines that come into play however here we are with my subaru and the air doesn't work and honestly i've rather my wife be driving this and driving my car and the only way she's gonna do that the summer is if the air works so here we are the first thing I did was I just checked to see if there was any pressure at all in the system and there was not there was zip there was zero and this is not a good sign mainly because one of the things that happens in that instance is you get moisture in the system especially if it's been like that for a long time and moisture in an AC system wicked bat in fact they have a receiver drier or a drier assembly someplace in the system to absorb that moisture but it gets saturated awfully quickly it's not meant to take large amounts of moisture so should you find yourself in a situation where you've got a completely flat AC system and it has been that way for a while you really should replace the receiver dryer assembly or the dryer assembly if not there could be problems that arise from that but I'm going to walk you through the steps of one finding the leak and I've already found the leak on this system it's pretty substantial all I had to do is hook my gauges up that's how bad it is and I'm gonna try something else which I probably shouldn't show you but you know what if it works it works and that is I'm going to attempt to repair the leak and go from there so all kinds of exciting fun things for you in this episode of Eric the car guy all right like I said you've got a high-pressure side look big H and a low-pressure side to a/c and you can take either one of these caps off this system is a 134a system anything older than life's a 96 has an r 12 system but that should really be converted because our 12 is not sold anymore and if you can't find it is prohibitively expensive and most conversion kits involve changing these fittings here which are very different than the r12 fittings but one of the things that I like to try is I'll just push down on that Schrader valve briefly to see if there's any pressure in the system and since I don't have fingers shaped like chopsticks I'm just gonna use this screwdriver blade and just briefly do this and keep your face away from here in fact we should probably be wearing a safety glasses from here on out which is what I will do but just push down on it briefly it's the same thing as a tire valve you can see on this one I'm pushing down and there's absolutely nothing coming out but if you get like a little squirt that means there's some pressure in the system which is a very good sign okay and the interest of teaching you good practices we're gonna wear these from here on out since we know the system is completely empty one of the things that you can do to try to figure out if the system can hold pressure is you can put a vacuum on it for that you need to purchase a vacuum pump now there are two fittings on a manifold gauge set which is what you're gonna need in order to do any kind of AC work I picked up this set at Harbor Freight that was rather inexpensive there are two different sizes the high side is the fat one the big one and then you run down valve there the low side is the smaller one blue one this that valve was already run down and my leak has already manifested all I had to do was hook this stuff up see that dripping out well there is already under Neath my low pressure inlet there is a pretty sizable leak in this to the fact there's a little puncture wound right about here so normally I would have put a vacuum on the system to see if it would hold vacuum if it did not hold vacuum then I would know that the system is compromised in some way we could add AC die there's a few different ways you could go about trying to find what the leaks are but that's the number one thing you deal with what they see is leaks so we know that there's a leak in this low-pressure line so the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to remove said line and see if I can repair to remove this line is fairly simple right here on the inlet of the compressor there's a fastener there there's a couple of clamps that hold it up underneath this is where it goes it travels back from here all the way over to this is the evaporator Inlet on this side and just goes through here so there's a bracket here and I believe there's another bracket up underneath this intake assembly case you're wondering what that receiver dryer thing looks like it's right here I got two wrenches got one it's a 24 and one that's a 27 [Music] now all I need to do is this 12 at the compressor now I just fished the line out of here now you want to be careful not to get any dirt or moisture in the system so be aware now over the bench here we can get a look at the cause of our problem which is right here this was caused by somebody there's a hole that's the hole and there's the gouge along the side well okay then this is what we have I went back and just added just a little bit more to the solder here if I'm honest I don't think this is gonna hold but I have really nothing to lose at this point so if it works it works great here's some oil that's good for 134 systems oil for r12 is different than oil for 134 I'm just going to move that real quick and last but not least I have this other oring here that I'm just gonna take my finger um it's a good idea to replace these o-rings I have my doubts on whether or not this will even work so I just lubricated the o-ring a bit and I'm gonna go over and install it on the vehicle the installation is pretty much gonna be a reverse of removal try to fish this so no ring it seals these my trenches are long so just once you get it on there just just another like corner turn or so when you're done don't run it down so tight you strip it out okay I'm first I'm gonna hook my game just back up both valves are closed now we need something called a backing pump this is a vacuum pump this one wasn't that expensive I got it at Harbor Freight and you basically have two ports that you can hook up to on the top this is the one that fits my gauge set it runs on a good old 110 or it could run on something else depending upon what country body then you have the third hose that's on your gauge set yellow one that one I'm gonna hook to here then I am going to plug it in it's going to begin to suck alright now that I've got that on I'm going to open up my gauges I'm just gonna leave both sides open and I'm gonna leave it sit on here for Oh half-hour so you can see how the needle is burying down that's exactly what I wanted to do because it's putting a vacuum on the system what this does is it makes it so any moisture that's in the system will boil away water boils because of the pressure that's on the outside of it so you take away that pressure and it'll boil away that's that's the idea behind this so the reason we're putting a vacuum on the system is to eliminate moisture but also it's a way for checking for leaks without having to pressurize the system report refrigerant into it so it's a safe way to check to see if your system has any leaks or not so I'm just going to let that vacuum pump run on here for uh I'm gonna say about 20-30 minutes and I'm gonna come back close the valve and let it sit and see if it holds vacuum my actually be able to see this but that's the moisture boiling away just like it see a pot of boiling water I forgot it okay it's in about 25 minutes I'm gonna close my name and let it sit all right now you can actually see that this one right here is dropping fairly rapidly that probably means that there's a leak somewhere in the system knowing that I need to put a receiver dryer on this anyway I just wanted to see if I could hold pressure it's quite possible my repairs junk so I'll probably get that low pressure line in addition to a receiver dryer and then I'm gonna go through the same process again so I still have a leak somewhere and eventually I'm gonna have to find out where that leak is so this is what I'm gonna do I'm going to use refrigerant dye this is something that's commonly done to find leaks I'm gonna go through the process of what you do whenever you're putting this into the system and then I'm gonna recharge it just enough to get the system to work and to get this dye circulated throughout that way even even after I replace the hose if there are other leaks in the system I should be able to find them then I've got the the dye in the system okay so here are the materials that I have I've got my manifold gauge set I've got a high and a low pressure hookup but the center one is the one that I hooked up to my vacuum it's also what you use to charge things up with so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to take a little bit of this AC dye and I'm going to put it in this hose here before I hook it up to my refrigerant this is like commercially available stuff that you can find you're gonna need a lot of times it will come with like a little gauge attachment so that you can attach it to the top of the container itself before we do that I'm gonna take a little bit of this dye and put it inside this hose that's what I do this I think just to unscrew the hose here because you'll note there's no Schrader valve in there the other end has a valve assembly so you're not able to pour it directly in there but you are able to pour it into here and now I'm just gonna add just a little bit of dye to the inside this house gonna let it seep down in there and that that should be plenty you don't really need a whole lot then I'm going to screw this back on to my gauge yourself and you probably want to work gloves when you do this because you'll notice on my hands already this is die it will staining okay here refrigerant they come in smaller cans too and then this one came with this this attachment that screws on at the top here and I should have said this to start with there's like a little thing that punctures the top of that can in here so you want to turn it all the way out between for you try to screw it down onto the refrigerant container [Applause] and there we go now I'm forgetting something very crucial here which I'm going to go get right now you know that movie where they say you'll shoot your eye up well with AC work it's possible you can freeze your eye out not cool so whenever you're working with AC stuff just put your safety glasses on before there was no pressure in the system but right here this is my pressure so I have to respect this now take your third hose and put it on to the end here make sure both valves are closed so turn them all the way clockwise now you run down the puncture this will puncture the can sort of felt it there now it's all the way down now I'm going to start opening it back up it's the weird part about this I'm gonna start opening it back up and now refrigerant can exit and go into the manifold gauge set so run it all the way down and then run it back out just hurt it fill up this hose we've already got a dye into the hose I probably could have put a little more in but yeah check for leaks now because you don't want any leaks here because you don't want to suck in the air in the system now I'm gonna start the car and turn the AC on I'm gonna put the AC on vent turn the fan on here turn the AC button on okay the engines now on you can see the AC compressor is not working I've got my refrigerant ready to go and I'm gonna feed it into the low side don't feed it into the high side feed it into the low side but do it slowly but for me since I know there's a leak as soon as I see the compressor kick on I'm gonna shut it off and just let it run but all you got to do is now it's open up the low-pressure side and it's adding refrigerant and I should be there goes just kicked on I'm just turning that off just enough to get it circulated through the system this way I know the dye will get through the AC system both cooling fans are coming on keep in mind I'm only doing this to try to run to try to circulate refrigerant through the system so now what I'll do is I'll close off by refrigerant here run this pin all the way down again and I'll go back up here to my Gage and I'll open this up again and what this will do is this will suck out and either remaining refrigerate that's in this line the low-pressure side of the system should draw it in now I'll disconnect my gauges we're gonna reinstall my caps while I was editing the video I realized that never showed you the die in action but if you just take like even this is my old like 1970s black lighting UV light and put it on this die it tells you exactly where the leaks are it's really easy to find them so this is what the UV dye does when you put it in the system and it's very good at helping you find leaks like this and they make handheld versions of these lights but you know you can use stuff let's laying around but I mean any place this dye goes it's going to show up very very clearly in fact look down inside the system you can see that it pretty much permeates everything and goes throughout so UV dye is a great way to find a/c leaves another method besides using dye to find leaks is one of these fancy leak detector things what this does is basically you go around underneath you go on the underside to spray ons heavier-than-air all the parts of the AC system listening for this thing to changes since we have an only I can show you real quick how this works but a word of caution like when the fans are running it can blow stuff around underneath the engine compartment and this is not always as accurate as is the dye I've used both methods it got pretty good with it I like to use this for check to check for evaporator leaks as far as all the stuff under the hood where all the lines and fittings and stuff meets this is an OK way of finding it but personally I prefer using dye because it shows you exactly where the leak is I'm gonna actually turn the car off for this you can see it starts out look like one line but then once you find a leak it'll react but see how it didn't find it when the engine was running but it finds it now like I said if if I'm looking for Lisa the evaporator I often use the sniffer tool to find those leaks since it's up inside the dash and you can't necessarily see the die well you might be able to see is if you look at the evap tube if there's dye around the outside of that that's usually a good indication that something is leaking inside there it may not be the evaporator may be like an expansion valve or something but you really won't know if it's inside the dash until you get inside the dash exactly what is leaking so be prepared for the worst but this is this is what I do I turn the air on on low I turn the AC on and I put it on vent then I get my sniffer and just turn it on and sniff around the area of the vents for any refrigerant and it's funny that I'm getting a little bit of one because and you'll find it actually more if you hold it like up above the vents sometimes you don't want to put the van on high because it'll once again that messes this thing up but I am getting like little traces of something here I'm looking for like a lot of noise more like that or worse but that's how I check evaporators with the sniffer okay here's something I want to point out as like let's call it an area of interest when you're looking for leaks look in this area just behind the AC compressor clutch slash pulley assembly because sometimes the front compression might leak and if it does it will show up in this area well we know my repair didn't work for sure now definitely see some leaks there and put it like I said a smaller one a refrigerant in there you really don't want the refrigerant to get out into the atmosphere I consider that just irresponsible but there are times when you just can't do it any other way because the leak detector needs to find refrigerant dye needs to be in the system to go through it the the thing that I want you to avoid is just venting an entire AC system and then the atmosphere that is just not cool so if you if you do find yourself in a situation where you need to perform some AC repair and you know there's a refrigerant still in the system itself take it somewhere and have them evacuate that system I mean you don't have to have them do the repair they can just hook up a machine that will take out all the refrigerant that's in the system and safely recycle recover it safely recover it and possibly recycle it and then you can do your your pair's and then you can recharge the system but I ordered this new part online like I said it didn't work I don't know what I'm gonna have to go through to find the right part it's not exactly easy to find a suction hose for a 97 Subaru but I'll do what I can and I'll be back in hopefully next time we'll fix it but I'm glad I did not put that receiver dryer on there because like I said if what I did didn't fix it then I want to know that now I don't want to put my receiver dryer on it possibly contaminate it with a bunch of moisture we'll be back when we get a new hose all right back again for attempt number three on this hose I'm going to check and make sure for starters that the inlet to the compressor that connection is good and once again try to install this hose and then we're going to vacuum the system down and check leaves and then if there aren't any leaks I'm gonna go back and install the receiver dryer go back and check for leaks again and then recharge the system so through the magic of editing I'm gonna pop this thing on the car so now I'm gonna hook my gauges up run a vacuum on it we can see if the system holds vacuum all right I've been running a vacuum on this for about 20 minutes so the next step that I'm gonna take is I'm gonna close off the balance on the gages turn out the vacuum pump and let it sit for like another 20 minutes and see if the pressure drops or the vacuum goes away well this is an encouraging sign because it's been about 20 minutes and it doesn't look like the vacuum has changed at all so there's still vacuum on the system however as part of my plan I didn't want to replace the receiver dryer until I was absolutely certain that there were no leaks in the system but now that I'm fairly certain that there aren't any leaks in the system I'm gonna now replace the receiver dryer and then pretty much go through this process all over again but this time instead of waiting so long after I vacuum the system down I'm gonna start charging it up and I'm first going to start by disconnecting the electrical connection and then it's just a question at these two 10 millimeters here and then down underneath here is another 10 this is a bracket that sort of pinches it and holds it in place all right before I install this there's some things I need to switch over this is the old one obviously in the new one which I'm grateful came with some new o-rings but we're going to have to switch over the pressure switch from the old unit to the new and if we line things up we're also going to have to remove this plug here this is where the lines attach so we're going to need to remove this plug up here and install our pressure switch there and you know what there's a new o-ring here so I'm actually going to use this o-ring instead of the old one since its new I'm still going to add just a little bit of refrigerant oil and remove the old or inge don't want a double o-ring it won't seal that's close with the sight glass and I think we'll be okay though now you don't need to crank things down an AC parts so tight you break them just make it snug this is a very long wrench so you don't need to twist it too much and you're exerting a lot of force now let's swap the o-rings on the lines and get this on the vehicle and get it vacuuming down again I'm just gonna take my pocket screwdriver and peel off the old o-rings I'm also gonna compare them to the new o-rings to make sure they are a similar size and thickness and I'm gonna be honest the few o-ring looks a little bit smaller than the old one I actually think I'm gonna go with the old o-rings they don'ts they're still very pliable they're not damaged in any way so I'm gonna just reuse the old ones and lube them up now we're ready to install our new part just gonna slider it in it's got a couple of stickers that seal off the top and peel this off now that's that and this is where I'm gonna choose to end this video I'm just gonna focus on the repair and the detection of leaks in this video I'm gonna make another separate video all together about evacuating the system in recharging it we touched on it a little bit in this video but I feel that not everybody's gonna benefit from the information from this one but a lot more people will benefit from the information from like say a video just strictly on evacuation and recharging so I'm gonna end this one here I hope this information was useful to you especially if you have one of these vehicles a number one thing that I want to impart a little bit of oil on the o-rings before you insert things don't tighten things so tightly that you either deform the o-rings and actually cause a leak also if the system has been open for any length of time it's been some time since the AC system function and you know there was a leak as large as there was in this one there's gonna be moisture in the system so you have to replace that receiver drier or in some cases it's going to be called an accumulator it just depends on where it's located its function is exactly the same on either system and it's there to remove the moisture in the system and that's why we're gonna evacuate everything out all the air out of here because that's going to allow that moisture in that water to boil away in essence if we lower the atmosphere that the water is in it's going to have more of a tendency to boil and that's pretty much what it does is it just quite literally boils off the the water that's that's in the system so you want to get as much moisture out as possible you want to make sure that you've found all the leaks verify that you've made the repair by leaving it on a vacuum for a significant amount of time so I could be reasonably certain that I don't weeks I hope that this information is going to be of use to you i am eric the car guy you can always find me eric the car guy comm facebook twitter google+ i welcome your comments be safe have fun stay dirty see you next time for the recharge back in a bit

Channel: EricTheCarGuy

Views: 2,002,812

Keywords: AC, AC leaks, fixing AC leaks, finding AC leaks, air conditioning, air conditioning service, air conditioning leaks, automotive air conditioning, ac doesn't work, ac broken, ac not cool, ac repair, air conditioning repair, ac leaks, ac dye, how to use ac dye, ac leak detector, ac sniffer, ac hose, ac hose replacement, ac o ring, ac service, ac how to, air conditioning how to, diy ac, diy ac leaks, automotive education, eric the car guy, ericthecarguy, etcg

Id: 95RdGLFIbL8

Length: 28min 47sec (1727 seconds)

Published: Mon May 28 2012