How to find leak when the A/C system is empty

[Music] now you know oftentimes when a car comes in and the air conditioning is not working right when we kind of find a leak we'll use die different things like that but what about the time when the car comes in you put your gauges on and there's no pressure so right away you're thinking it's got a leak so you take the cap off and you push the little needle on the schrader valve down and you don't get any escape at all so you know there's no pressure in the system you got a major leak so what are you faced with you can't charge the system because if you put freon in it it won't stay it's just going to go out and evaporate to the atmosphere and you can't have that so we got to find another way to kind of pressurize the system so that we can see where that pressure has been escaping here's what i do now it's really a pretty simple little thing all i have to do is kind of think ahead and get a couple things going but typically you've got your gauges already attached and you've got them open so you're open to the car's pressure system and there's no pressure and the gauges tell you that now normally when we're going to charge a system we have our other line where we put a can tap so all you simply have to do is remove the can tap when you take the can tap out now you've got a a threaded outlet so what goes in there all you have to use is your regular air compressor fitting quick connect but you don't want the kind like this you don't want the kind like this that is female on the outside you want the kind like this that is male threads for a quick connect and you simply screw that in now the threads are not matched they're not the same so you're not going to screw it all the way in it's only going to go in a couple threads but that's okay because we're not worried about high pressure here now there's another little trick you got to do when you screw this in the regular can tap is the right thread so it will fit in there tight and make that fit tight but this is going to be loose and when i move this up here you're going to see that it's loose so when we put air in there it's going to leak so you got to seal that do that simply with the rubber band now you just simply take a rubber band and you start wrapping it around there because we want to seal it with the rubber and apply a little bit of pressure with the band kind of effect so you just want to wrap that around several times until it's tight just a regular rubber band kind of a wide rubber band and then when you put it on there now it's it's tight it won't leak now you simply take your shop air and you got our fitting on there now we take our shop quick connector let me put it on there it's not air tight that's okay we're not looking for airtight we just want air in the system air pressure i just let that lay down now it's going to be a little bit hard for you to hear this but there's two things what i usually do is i just start listening for the escaping ear wherever it's going to be you're going to hear it leak now just from with my own ears right here i can hear leaking somewhere down here now keep in mind we're looking for a large leak if it was a small leak you'd probably use the die but since there was no air in the system or no pressure in the system and we're putting sharp air in the system and we have a large leak i should hear a large leak air sound so i'm going to use my listening ear because it intensifies it so you just basically take your wand and you move it all around and you'll be listening for air leakage don't hear hardly anything over in here i start hearing more here not so much over here and starts getting pretty intense down in this area so as i put my wand down in there i can hear this getting very intense sound take it over this way so i know my leak is somewhere down in here okay i took a couple of these fasteners loose right here the whole some of the plastic covering on and when i pulled this back i can see down there there's a crack in the little pipe now it's very hard for me to show you this way so i'm going to put the light down there and then i'll move the camera down so you can see it so we found our lake we know where it's at it's down here now we just simply have to make the repair now what do you do if you're loosening around here and you don't hear any kind of leak out here but you know you got a large leak well of course it could be the evaporator right and nobody wants to take the dashboard out unless they have to so basically this works really really good if you put this on and go and listen at the events where the air is supposed to come out because the air would blow past the vents into the cab when it's going to cool the cap and if you have a large leak in the evaporator and that's where this air pressure we're putting in is leaking at you would hear it at the vents and then you know i'm safe to take that dashboard out because i have to have a large leak in the evaporator because that's the only way that leaking sound could come from there now you don't have to use these you can just use your own ears but these help you zero in so you don't have to take more apart than you need to in order to find where the actual leak is understanding that the ac system has a compressor that will make pressure but it has to keep that pressure but it can't because it's got a large leak so if we just use our shop air which can keep pressure going in and keep it constant then we can listen for the escape of that air and zero in on where our leak is

Channel: realfixesrealfast

Views: 370,974

Keywords: ac leak

Id: Yp-pkhc1Gek

Length: 6min 28sec (388 seconds)

Published: Tue May 26 2020