How To Recharge Freezer or Refrigerator - Adding Refrigerant or Freon to R134A Appliance

hey my name is ben thanks for stopping by in this video i'm going to be showing you guys how to add refrigerant to a freezer or refrigerator it's a very similar process either way and we're specifically talking about r134a units not units that are uh with the new refrigerants which are like a propane based refrigerant that is flammable so we're not talking about those and those are something that are fairly new still and i'm even really not familiar with what the best options are for repair with those but a lot of units out there especially older ones that you're going to be working on are still going to be r134a that's the other thing i would mention too is if you're looking for a refrigerator or freezer i would try to find one that is still r134a and not the new propane based refrigerants although i think that's going to become more and more difficult as time goes on so the particular freezer that we're working on today is a frost free freezer meaning it goes through defrost and this thing has a leak somewhere now previously i did charge this thing up probably about three years ago and it has ran fine up until now as you can see though it has now gotten to the point where this thing is running at a higher temperature than it should you can see right now it's at 23 degrees fahrenheit and it's not pulling down to that five or 10 below zero that we would like to see and that leads me to talking about what your philosophy is regarding how you want to repair the refrigerator the best option obviously is to find the leak fix the leak and then charge the unit back up again now when you have such a tiny minuscule leak that like we have in this particular unit where it took several years for the refrigerant charge to leak out even though there's only a few ounces in the system that leak is going to be very close to impossible to find and probably even more difficult to fix especially if it's in like the sidewalls or or some place that you can't really access very well so if you're okay with the inconvenience of it you can use a refrigerator like this by just adding some refrigerant once every few years and that's exactly what we're going to be doing today is we're going to recharge this thing back up a little bit so that it's good to go for the next three years again right here is that label that i was talking about you can see it is marked r134a and gives us our manufacture date of 2010 march 15th and you can see it gives us our oil charge in ounces as well as our r134a charge in grams and i converted that back to ounces again and that's 4.2 ounces of r134a so once you know that it's a 134a unit you can continue on your process of possibly charging it up but the first thing that i would like you to do before then is to make sure the compressor is for sure running you should be able to put your hand on the compressor while it's plugged in and feel that it is vibrating and sounds like there's a motor turning inside of it and you should also be able to feel on the discharge and inlet pipes that they are different temperatures so this is our discharge line and that is warmer to the touch than the line coming back so we know that this compressor is at least operating and compressing because if it's not compressing and it's not running you wouldn't have that temperature differential and the compressor wouldn't be vibrating a symptom of a compressor that is bad is that it clicks and then clicks off again and it'll just keep doing that over and over again every couple of minutes and that means that the compressor is locked and if that's the case it's not worth tapping into the system and trying to fix it once you know that you want to access the system and check the refrigerant charge you will have to add a line tap as we typically call them or a bullet piercing valve i will link them in the description of this video if you click on that little triangle you should be able to see the link there to where you can purchase one of these as you can see this one has already been installed but i have made a video previously about how to install one of these so i'll make sure to link that in the description as well as at the end of this video but you'll have to go ahead and get a line tap installed and when you install this you basically crank this down on either side and then right here in the middle there's a little allen piercing screw that you tighten down that punches a little hole in the copper pipe and what you'll do is you'll tighten that down it'll punch the hole in the pipe and leave it tightened in which will leave this valve assembly closed until we are ready to open it up to our gauges to be able to check the pressures and that leads me to talking a little bit more about what tools you're going to need you're going to need some sort of set of gauges this is a very nice set of digital gauges i'll link to these in the description but i'll also link to some good standard basic ones that you can use for the exact same thing so you need a set of gauges with the manifold so you can make your connection onto the freezer to check the pressure and then you're also going to need some r134a refrigerant you can see here that we have a large tank of it but you can actually get our 134a refrigerant for vehicles in the small cans and i believe they sell the correct adapters to where you can even use those to charge your refrigerator so i'll try to link to that stuff if i can in the description and then you're also going to need some sort of a scale this is a nice refrigerant scale i'll link it in the description as well but this is going to allow us to weigh in how much refrigerant we are adding to the system now before we make this connection here i just wanted to explain a couple more things that you could check the first one is to make sure that the coil inside of the unit is not all iced up if it's totally frozen then it can seem like it's low on refrigerant when it's actually not in this case i know that that's not that's not what we have going on so that has been checked off the list for me but make sure that if you have a frost free freezer like this one if that defrost timer for some reason failed then you could end up with a huge accumulation of ice on the coil inside and it would not cool properly if you have a freezer like this one over here which is kind of standard and the shelves themselves are refrigerated where the refrigerant goes to the shelves then that frosting up issue really is not as much of a concern the next thing that you can check is just to see if the sides of the refrigerator are warm to the touch or not so when this thing is operating it rejects the heat through the condenser coil which is located right underneath the outer skin of the freezer or refrigerator and that's pretty standard sometimes they'll have a separate condenser down below so if there's like a coil and a fan down there then that's not exactly how this works but in this case it goes up into the side walls and that's where it rejects all the heat from the unit and so if the sidewalls are really nice and warm all the way around the chances of it being low on refrigerant are not very high right now with this one the sidewalls pretty much feel like their ambient temperature almost everywhere meaning that there's likely not enough refrigerant to condense in the walls of the unit to be able to adequately cool so once you confirm that you do have the low refrigerant symptoms then go ahead and install that valve like i said i'll link to that for how to do that in the description so you can jump over there and then come back if you need to but then we're going to go ahead and access the system now and check the pressures now as you can hear the unit is running and you will want the unit to be running while you add refrigerant now it's very very important you pay close attention to the next part that i'm going to explain and that is that most likely if your unit is low on r134a refrigerant it is going to be operating in a vacuum so the low side pressure that we're going to be checking in a minute is actually going to have a negative pressure and so when you connect your hose to it it will suck air or moisture or whatever happens to be around it into the system which is why we're going to go through the process of bleeding out the hose really well on our gauges so that there's fresh refrigerant all the way up to our access port so that we don't accidentally end up pulling air or contaminants into the system now we're going to connect our center hose from our manifold over here to our jug of refrigerant so this is the hose that is going to be providing refrigerant to the system so we'll just go ahead and attach this on here like so and then we will over here on our gauges we will make sure that the hoses are tight on the back of the manifold which is where our connections to the manifold are made and then we'll make sure that our valves are closed both the high and the low side valves so make sure those are both closed right now and now we should be safe to go ahead and turn this on so we'll turn that on [Music] so that's on and ready to go so that weighs 32 pounds 1.8 ounces we're actually going to zero this out now and what's going to happen is as we charge refrigerant into the system the scale is going to read a negative number which will represent how much refrigerant has come out of the tank now back to our gauges what we're going to do now is bleed out the air that was in these lines so the valves on the actual hoses themselves have already been opened you can see this valve is open and the valve down on our tank there is open so i'm just going to use the low side valve on my gauges to bleed a little bit of refrigerant out of this line so that we don't have any air or contaminants in those lines okay i'm gonna close the valve on my hose now i also closed the valve up here so uh if you don't have a valve on the end of your hose i'm gonna show you still how to bleed it out here in just a second right when we're ready to connect it down to the system that's pretty much all that we have to do for the setup so let's go down and connect this to the actual unit so since we have our line tap ready to go all we're going to have to do is take the cap off right here and that will give us access to this port you can see right there make sure that the rubber gasket stays inside the cap and doesn't stick to the end of your access port now we'll take our hose and connect this onto here now i'll just show you i'm going to open this up for now there's going to be a little bit of gas in there but i'm gonna i'm just gonna loosely attach this this is how you would do it if you didn't have a valve or even if you do have a valve it's it's a good practice to do it this way so we're gonna get this started all right we got it started there but it's still loose now what we're going to do is we're going to actually open the valve on our low side here it's going to allow refrigerant to come up from our r134a tank that we have attached back down the blue hose and over to here and bleed out the rest of the air that is in this hose and in this connection port area right here so i'm just gonna crack that tiny bit like that and then while it's bleeding i'll go ahead and attach this the rest of the way now we'll close the valve back up on our on our gauges so now we are ready to access the system and check the pressure inside of the low portion of this compressor i guess that's the one other thing i should mention for when you add your line tap there's typically going to be a tag that comes off of the tank somewhere that's for the low side there's almost always just one tag like this and you can put your line tap on there if for some reason you don't have access to this or yours doesn't have it you can also put it on the actual low side line so over here there's the high side coming out this is the low side in theory you could put the tap right there as well if you needed to but it's always best to add it directly to the can right here if at all possible so from the previous time i added refrigerant i saved my little allen wrench that came with it this is what we're going to use to open up that valve if i can get it loose here there it is and right on the end of this line tap there's a spot where we can insert this little allen wrench right in the center here so right now it's all the way closed so this is all the way tightened so it's right now the the pressure that we're reading here uh is just showing us what's in this hose currently so from bleeding out uh the refrigerant so as soon as i open this it will start to allow the little bit of refrigerant that's in the hose into the system and then ultimately give us a reading of what's actually in there so we'll go ahead and open that you can see it started to come down in pressure already it's a pretty small opening though so it will take a second i'm just going to open it a little bit more so we'll just see what this comes down to i'm guessing it's going to go into the negatives here momentarily they're down to 16 9 seven here we go here we are in the negative so now it's showing us inches of mercury so we're at almost 10 inches of mercury so far so this thing is running in a vacuum currently and that's why it's absolutely essential that you go through that bleeding process because right now all it's doing is putting this hose this blue hose into a little bit of a vacuum which is not going to hurt anything at all because this hose had r134a refrigerant in it ready to be pulled into the system instead of accidentally introducing air into the unit now is the fun part we get to actually add our refrigerant so we are all ready to go we're connected and the refrigerant from the tank is connected up to the center port of our gauges and then as soon as we open this low side valve right here it's going to introduce refrigerant into this blue line which will start to charge the unit now we want to do this process very slowly because you don't want to flood the compressor with liquid refrigerant so we're going to just very slightly open up this valve and then we're going to watch how much refrigerant we've put into the system like i said already we have 4.2 ounces is the total charge that this particular unit takes and i think i'm gonna put in around four ounces actually which will probably leave us with a tiny bit of an overcharge i'm guessing this system probably has about an ounce left in it right now since this thing does have a very slow leak that every three years or so it ends up where it's not able to cool anymore all right let's go ahead and add some refrigerant so we'll just very carefully crack open this valve now as we add refrigerant you'll see that the the weight over here is going to show a negative number you can see we're at minus 0.5 ounces so far and we're going to go all the way up to 4 ounces the pressure showing on the screen right here is is the pressure in this hose it's not necessarily the pressure on the actual low side of the unit these line taps have such a tiny opening on into the system that it's actually kind of hard to like charge it too fast because it almost acts as like a regulating device itself uh not allowing too much refrigerant in all at once if you were charging an air conditioner or some other appliance though and you had a full size tap into the system it's very likely that you could charge it too fast either way though we're charging this at a very low rate using this low side valve right here and typically it'll get cold right past the valve so right here where i'm feeling with my fingers this is cold to the touch because that liquid refrigerant is coming in right here and then evaporating as it goes into the blue we're hose to two ounces now so we're halfway there oh over here on my gauges while that's uh working on that right now it's in r404a mode but we can actually go to r134a let's see if we can find it here there it is so r134a is going to give us an automatic readout for our vapor saturation temperature based on the current pressure of the system so right now 52 degrees is the vapor saturation temperature of basically the pressure inside of this hose once we stop adding refrigerant this vapor saturation temperature will accurately represent what the vsat of the system is at operating pressures so you can watch that as i shut this off it'll start to show us the actual evaporator temperature inside of this freezer all right there we are we have four ounces so i'll go ahead and close this valve it was just barely open and now our pressure will slowly drop to match the actual temperature inside of the unit once all the refrigerant has gone into the system that is in this hose now at this point you will know whether or not you were successful based on the pressure of the unit since we added close to the factory charge we know that this should not be running in a vacuum anymore after adding the refrigerant if the unit is still running in a vacuum after adding close to the factory charge most likely you're going to have some kind of an issue with the regulating device of the system which is where the liquid line comes out right here you can see it actually the liquid line comes out of the exterior of the unit and it goes through this little filter dryer and then it comes out as this little tiny wire like thing this is called the capillary tube and if this thing gets plugged no matter how much refrigerant you add it's not going to allow the refrigerant to circulate through the system so if you add the factory charge to the unit and it's still running in a vacuum most likely your capillary tube is plugged or your filter dryer is plugged and then you have your work cut out for you or you have to consider whether or not the unit is worth spending the time and money to repair if however you're able to add refrigerant just like we finished doing and it ends up running at a pressure that is acceptable or basically above zero you can see our vapor saturation temperature is now uh two below zero and we know that our box temperature currently is around 20 degrees so usually your vapor saturation temperature is going to run somewhere around 20 degrees colder than your box temperature so as the freezer cools down this number here will drop as well but either way if you're able to add the refrigerant and it starts working correctly like this then you are going to be good to go you will have a functional unit and it should work for quite a long time so if you have a unit that's kind of like mine you're going to end up with a situation where the unit is going to work great for a number of years and eventually you'll have to recharge it again so it's pretty inconvenient but to find this leak would be close to impossible i've spent a lot of time trying to find leaks like this and i very very rarely have any success the only time it really works to fix the leak is if you have a bad enough leak that you can actually trace it down so if you add refrigerant like this and two weeks or a month later it stops working again that's probably a leak you could find and fix so that would definitely be worth checking into if however it's a leak that is over several years only losing a couple of ounces then most likely your best option is either to just charge it up a little bit now and again or just buy a different unit altogether now you guys didn't see it on camera but i actually shut the valve off on this tank as it was about finished adding refrigerant and i'm going to now just go ahead and add the last tiny bit of remainder refrigerant that's inside of these hoses by closing off the valve on the top of the tank here like so opening this valve and then we'll just go ahead and add that tiny little bit of refrigerant that's left inside of these hoses into the unit you got to be careful with this because these hoses can hold an ounce uh depending on the situation these things are critically charged systems you don't want to have a situation where you have it significantly overcharged or under charged so try to get these things as precise as possible when you're charging them especially in a situation where you fix the leak then you want to get it to the exact factory charge and don't over charge it at all because most likely if if the leak is actually properly fixed that charge that you put into it will last the remainder of the life of the unit and if you charge it incorrectly it's not going to operate efficiently during that period of time for my situation if i'm about an ounce overcharged that's not going to last very long in about a year it's going to be the perfect charge a year after that it's going to be an ounce low and so on and so forth but it's just something that i'm willing to work with in order to have a spare freezer at our place and it's it's not the end of the world since i'm able to add a little bit of refrigerant once in a while so now i'm going to go ahead and get everything disconnected and put back and we should be good to go so let's go ahead and disconnect everything the valve on our refrigerant tank has already been closed so we're good to go on that now we're going to close the valve on the actual unit so i'm going to just crank this allen connection down here like so now i can just simply remove my hose just like that now always put the hose back onto its holder right away so you don't get any contaminants into the system remove the hose from our refrigerant tank and then we'll replace the cap onto our access port and finally take your little allen wrench and put that somewhere where it will be readily accessible for next time hopefully there's not a next time in your situation but for me i know that in about three years we'll be back here doing the same thing i should probably just buy a new unit hopefully that gave you a good overview of the process of adding refrigerant to an r134a appliance it's pretty similar for any appliance whether it be a refrigerator or a freezer or even other appliances that use r134a if it's a sealed system where you have to add a line tap and it uses a capillary tube as a regulating device that process is going to be pretty similar so if you found this to be helpful i'd appreciate it if you do me a favor hit that thumbs up button so it helps more people find this video and comment down below with any thoughts or suggestions that you might have for this if there's something that i happen to miss in this video a lot of times are some really smart people that will correct me in the comment section so definitely check that out because uh it can be both entertaining and informative in the comments again links in the description to the different products and tools and things that you might need for this particular project if you do click on one of those links a tiny percentage of your purchase goes to help support the channel at no extra cost to you so if you do use those links i really really appreciate it alright if you guys want to keep learning with me i'm going to put a couple videos here on the screen for you to choose from including that one where i install the line tap on a i think it's an air conditioner actually for that particular situation so we'll see you over there in just a few seconds the sides of this thing are now nice and hot when we started the video we are at 24 degrees we've already dropped 10 degrees all the way down to 14. see you later

Channel: Benjamin Sahlstrom

Views: 576,286

Keywords: r134a recharge refrigerator, refrigerant charging procedure, freon, r134a, freezer, refrigerator, freezer not freezing

Id: r8trnHixvJs

Length: 23min 45sec (1425 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 27 2021