Air conditioner gas leak

Our best expert in this regard is @lech auto air conditionin

Hopefully he sees this post and responds, but pretty sure he's going to say you need to put dye in the system and monitor for leaks throughout the system to be successful.

 

Yep for a do it yourself person who doesn’t have all the tools there’s not many choices

throwing a little UV dye is the easiest thing to do and cheapest

 

Wow phosphorus that’s the first time I’ve heard that one.
Do you mean fluorescent ?
Condenser is number one most leaking item on Prius they just seem to love to leak.

hoses very very very rarely leak on a Prius unless maybe it was in an accident and push back the fan shroud into the hoses or something seen some collisions from road debris underneath go up in between and hit pipes or hoses.


Then the next Leaker the most sad news of all and we always cross our fingers and hope it is not the case is the evaporator.

no one likes spending 7 1/2 hours to replace the evaporator.

sometimes but not always you will see a slight darkening of an oil spot the size of a dime the size of a quarter may be the size of a $.50 piece and you might see a few of the spots on your condenser that is kind of the telltale sign. But hopefully the person who you went to instead of phosphorus put fluorescent UV dye inside your vehicle and if you drive around for a little bit 95% of the time after a few hours or a few days a small tiny fluorescent spot of die will show up when looking at it using a bright UV light shining on your condenser.

there is the very very rare instance we’re also the pressure switch leaks does not happen often but it does happen.

 

Having been through this a while back, it went as follows. First they put in a fluorescent dye (not elemental phosphorus!) when they refilled the system. Based on this they changed some of the lines, but my impression was that the amount of dye they found was really too small to account for the amount of gas leaked. That repair didn't work, it leaked down just as fast as before, so they assumed it was the evaporator (hard to see leaks there as it is buried). That was indeed the problem since after that repair the A/C has been fine. So, if the dye finds a leak in the visible part of the system, mazel tov, you have a straightforward repair, albeit not cheap if the compressor is where the leak is. If the dye doesn't find the leak then you probably have to replace the evaporator, which as Lech indicated, requires a lot of labor, in addition to the fairly expensive part.

Unfortunately having the evaporator start to leak is a pretty common problem in 15-20 year old cars.

 

You can click on my icon picture I think and it brings you over to my Prius chat page you could look at my photo album and some of my movies on YouTube that shows what it looks like

 

And supposedly whoever you take it to who’s a mechanical repair shop dealer or anybody should have but they don’t always have a good leak detector unfortunately the real world the ones doing the business often are cheap and will buy cheap tools that only half nice person find larger leaks not sensitive enough to find really small leaks .

The majority of individuals attempting to repair AC usually ackackknowledge or are cheap and say whatever they have is good enough making up some sort of fairytale excuse.

as long as it got cold and lasted long enough for them to collect money what they deem a reasonable amount of time they consider that a successful repair.

it’s the unfortunate state our trade industry is in lack of knowledge is rampant cheapness prevails and ignorance is bliss.

And if you call out anybody in our trade on that they get their panties all watered up in a bunch of their butt crack and get offended.

supposedly we all have to be nice and get along together and live in this little fantasy fairytale world of rainbows and ponies and unicorns and every little Johnny gets a trophy.

unfortunately for you the customer you end up paying the price getting sold stuff you don’t need not getting sold stuff you do need and not getting the correct repair in the first place that has a long life.

like if you watch one of the recent videos put out by Scanner Danner on air conditioning repairs on YouTube it’s one of those Greek stories of comedy and tragedy it’s entertaining.

but he’s learning I scolded him lectured him a little bit in a few of his air-conditioning videos and apparently it seems like he read something and researched a little bit and he added a micron meter to his arsenal and started using nitrogen to look for leaks. And as he breaks things and makes mistakes he calls it learning.

he’s a professional educator and a automotive feel I call it a tragedy when these are things you learned in high school auto shop From your auto shop teacher.

and then as a technician is in this trade supposedly he went to air conditioning seminars that were put on by the manufactures that were anywhere from one day to three days long from Murray air conditioning products from 4 SEASONS air conditioning products from five star air-conditioning products from Motorcraft air conditioning products from General Motors air conditioning products from Nippon Denso air conditioning products and 20 more manufacturers he spent decades every year in the summertime attending one of these seminars all about air-conditioning and you learned all these things that I show in my videos.

but apparently the majority in our trade we’re too stoned out drinking with the buddies watching football too cheap to invest in a class too lazy to invest in a class choose to be ignorant because it would take effort to learn in our automotive trade.

so they call breaking things and messing up and making mistakes the normal every day is learning procedure and therefore that makes it OK and then charge the customer for it.

 

Sadly this took place at the service department of the "#1 largest volume Toyota dealership in the U.S.A. since 1967". They may not have been feeling very motivated because this used car had a very good warranty that they provided. Perhaps they were calculating that if I had to go back enough times, even though the service was free, I would just give up and go elsewhere. Wrong.

As far as I know they never used a sniffer. No notes about that on the service records they provided. What does a leak from the evaporator "look" like with a sniffer? I would expect that it would seep out into the engine compartment through an assortment of paths. Seems like that would be pretty distinct from a failed O-ring or pinhole in a pipe, where a detector could move up the gradient to the source relatively easily.

 

Here's a leaking evaporator from a 4runner. Has UV dye and am using 400nm "UV" LED light and yellow tinted glasses (that enhance visibility).

Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.

 

Go to Lech's YouTube channel. He has plenty of videos demonstrating using his 'sniffer' tools.

 

I have some videos on my YouTube channel showing my leak detector picking up the leak in evaporators on cars even a few Prius

depending on the size of the leak can pick it up right to the vents out the dash from the drip tube that’s in the bottom of the HVAC case where the condensate water comes out of

visually I believe I have some photos here on Prius chat in my photo album they’ll be a dark spot where the oil has come out and coded the metal and then dust has accumulated on the oil indicated by the darker color.

 

Looks like a condenser. Anyway, that piece looks like it was pulled out of the evaporator core, which on the Prius is a big plastic shell buried in the dash, the left piece in this picture:


Not sure how one would obtain a similar view easily. It is still pretty covered up even after it is out of the dash if it is still in the core.

 

When you get the evaporator core out take some nice detailed pictures all around to show us to look for a slightly darkened area that has gathered a little bit of dust. This will indicate your leak point

 

Yep, they should look for dark spots like this condenser.

The cooling fins on this one are corroded and failing as well.

Posted via the PriusChat mobile app

 

There’s a lot of guys who guess and top off refrigerant and give me some really ridiculously high high side pressures that they consider normal for Prius

here’s my Prius it’s 99° outside and this is what normal pressures and temperatures look like

With some of the ridiculously high pressures that some people who top off with cans tell me they get on 100° day that’s what happens when you guessing you don’t do it right

 

What happens to air-conditioning in the real world where cars usually are operating driving down a road is whirls different than sitting in a garage with the hood up part at idle