Has anybody, put a air conditioner on there 2001 prius, as a backyard mechinac can it be done fairly easy, or should I take it to a shop? thanks
What part of air-conditioning you mean? You can pretty much put everything in as a back yard mechanic except you need to go to a shop for vacuum the system and freon install.
All 2001 Prius came with A/C as standard equipment. Did someone remove your A/C? Ask the question to a person who removed it. Ken@Japan
I've tried everything that I can figure out, as to why I have no cold air, took it to a dealer,(toyota) had it filled, spent 200.00 for the testing/fill, said maybe for 170.00 more, they could find why no air. So I picked up a reman ac compressor, hoping that will fix the problem. Can you put the compressor on, and drive to a place to put the freon in
There are a lot of reasons why you might not have cold air and a bad compressor is just one of them... I would hesitate to just replace the compressor is you have no idea if that's what's causing the problem. I can't imagine that the dealer would charge you $200 for testing and then not give you a diagnosis. Did they say that they suspected the compressor? Or was the $200 just for the fill (which seems very high) I hate to suggest that you spend more money, but I would suggest taking the car to someplace that actually knows what they're doing and having them diagnose the problem. Once you actually know what's wrong with it then you can go ahead and replace the bad parts. As the PP said, you should be able to replace pretty much any of the parts in the AC system and then have someone else charge it, however, if you just go blindly replacing parts you'll probably wind up paying more in the long run for charges and parts that don't fix the problem than you would spend on a proper diagnosis and whatever you need to fix the bad part. Good luck in any case, Brett
A first step before swapping any parts would be to go to an A/C service shop and have them recover the refrigerant. Even though the car uses the less ozone-depleting R-134a, don't just let it squirt out into the sky, thanks! Then you can swap parts to your heart's content before returning to a shop to have it evacuated and recharged. The amount of compressor oil in the system is kind of critical, too little and too much are both bad. There is some math to do when replacing parts, because the oil is spread through the system so you need to know how much to add to make up for the parts you've replaced. Then make sure the shop that does your recharge knows what you did, so they don't add extra oil if you took care of that, or so they do if you didn't. When I worked on an old R-12 car I made sure the guys who recovered the R-12 before I started wrote down the weight of R-12 they recovered. It was already out of production by then and selling for $30-$40 a pound. Then when I went back for the recharge, it took several conversations with managers before they "remembered" where they had "lost track of" my weight of R-12 that came out. That may be less of a concern with R-134a as it's not so pricey. -Chap
