Can you recharge ac by yourself or not?

I really don't care if you believe it or not.
Yes, EVERYONE knows you are the super master mr know it all about the Prius a/c.
Whatever you say is written in stone by your finger....
I just shared my experience. Just like everyone else on here.

As you were told by the moderator, if you don't like it, don't comment.
If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all.

ChapmanF
I didn't think about techstream.. I do have it.
But it is important to me, to take the time to figure out techstream. I've used it 3 times.
Once when I got it to play around with it.
Once to change the stupid backup beep to ONE beep on my car.
And once to change on a 2012 Prius V.

"IF" I ever get around to doing that, I will let you know.

 

There was somebody else's thread in the last year or so where somebody got black foamy gunk out of the cooling system. (I remember seeing it, but good luck finding it....)

Disconcerting.

 

Yes I posted a video of some black foamy material stuck inside the Prius electric water pump

 

This video was a repeat upload the tools would not let me delete the post so I just wrote down the sentence and reposted in the next posting the new video

 

I wish the camera had focused better on your Techstream screen. It would be fun to see the evap target temp and actual temp, and the high-side pressure reading to compare with your gauge set.

As for the difference between headrest temp and dash thermistor temp, I could probably believe both; they are in different spots and there was probably less circulation where the dash sensor is.

I bet you would get great compressor sound if you just stuck a long fat screwdriver down on the compressor and rested the phone on it.

 

I’ll try to do better placement without the glare and better focus on the text stream next time I get a chance it cost me dearly to take this amount of time to make videos that are more detailed. I literally have to lose one job in a day to do a small series of videos on one car. That’s why I do quick un-edited not detailed videos because it cost too much to do anymore.

I have a lapel mic wireless I was thinking of plugging into my phone and literally putting the microphone right on the compressor to get the best sound I could for the recording. But I just did not feel like spending the time connecting the transmitter and receiver in the lapel mic to my phone.

 

One physical connection, that must take hours to do from the tone of the post.

 

My money is still on the screwdriver.

 

Actually I’m lazy.

I have to take a protective phone case/battery back up off my phone every time I do that. And there’s a reason I have three phones to for back up seems like every time I take my phone out of my case I drop and break it.
the lapel mic is on 15 foot long wire that is wadded up in a ball in my center counsel in a cup that looks like a rat nest.

But most importantly I’m trying to get enough videos out there of pressures and temperatures when somebody asked the question about what pressure what temperature nothing understand there is no one set temperature and no one set pressure.

I did notice the PT chart that was printed up above it look like an old PT chart for all the AC systems that have been reprinted for Toyota with a standard piston driven compressor fix speed with a clutch.

I released another video about a minute and a half long on the computer screen looking in Toyotas website for information the paid mechanical version it showed a picture of a old heated refrigerant charging cylinder if you have ever seen one. Something used back in the 60s very early 70s. Used by small appliance guys back in the 50s. And Toyota is still showing a picture of that re-printed as part of their procedures when we were trying to look up a 2002 Toyota tundra refrigerant weight specification. It was something I played with and used as a child and my dad shop used to have one from the 60s and 70s. .

And most people are not patient enough to wait to 15 or 20 minutes of steady continuous run time on the air conditioning to let it level out and reach its peak performance and start dialing back the compressor speed and settling out the pressures.
The pressure you get when you first turn on the system is not the true system pressure for a few minutes. And many shops we get cars in who have a lot of work and are in a rush to make money make their bonus and pump the car out of their stall and get the next one in don’t take the time to properly diagnose and get pressures they just wanna throw parts at it and make a diagnosis after pressure when they first hook their gauges up.

Good example at rush diagnosis. Yesterday I did something I normally don’t do and went to a private customers house on a referral for his range rover air conditioning not working because the range rover Garage told him his compressor was bad and for $1800. they would replace it. You got a second opinion by a mechanic from a garage he told him to compressor was bad it would only cost him $1200 to replace it.

My purpose for showing up was just to recover the YF refrigerant out of his range rover and because I way the refrigerant I noticed it only had 200 g and this particular model should have 800 g. In my mind when you try to diagnose the system that’s low on charge mistakes get made.

So I told that private customer individual while I was on the hill in the cold wind in the evening as my last stop home. I’ll tell you what I want to do an extra procedure here I’m gonna throw your vehicle on a vacuum pump and fill your car back up 100% full 800g. ( i’m a little familiar with this car and something didn’t smell right in Denmark).
Customer started the vehicle turned on the AC the compressor, clutch did not engage this has a variable compressor with the solenoid built into the back of the compressor. I crawled underneath his vehicle got my phone camera up very packed almost cannot see anything nearly no room to get any fingers up there and I seen a disconnected plug wire to the solenoid.
I plugged it back in and the compressor came on and worked just fine. Summer was charged a couple hundred dollars from the range rover garage for the diagnosis I replace the bad compressor for $1800. And there was the second private garage second opinion to replace the bad compressor.
I let the customer see and explained every step and procedure I was for performing on his vehicle. I took pictures and videos of the stuff up underneath hidden in the engine compartment where you cannot normally see with my camera and showed the customer and explained in detail with all the components and how it got misdiagnosed. The charge was $480 for that hour+ I spent with him plus the 800 g of R1234YF. And this is what I’ve done for the past 30 years from 6:30 to 7 AM to 6:30 to 7 PM. All day nonstop I have never had one unbillable hour completely packed in advance with bookings for two weeks a head. I don’t hand out business cards. I don’t do flyers. I pulled my yellow page phone number add within a year of being business because I had too much work. I remove the signs and stickers off my vehicle after the first year and being work because it brought me too much business. All word-of-mouth.
I see this every day but usually only in shops and I see the sad story played out on Prius‘s since the day they rolled off the first one the factory floor and was sold.
I’m the guy shops in customers call after a vehicle has been to the dealer 2×4×6 times been to few private shops. Gone to specialty radiator and air conditioning shops and then finally makes it to me. So I get a cluster F$&@ of repair attempts sometimes with more damage than what the original vehicle had.
This is my every day scenario for the last 30 years been in my own business just specializing in air-conditioning only being called into shops to reevaluate or refix or at least rule out the possibility of something simple in the mechanics of air conditioning system.
It’s a unbelievable staggering amount of shops have gauges that are not accurate have temperature thermometers that are not accurate. Shops who attempt and believe their infrared the mom at her is giving them the correct temperature out of the center dash that is not accurate.

And when I’m first called into a new shop as a recommendation I look around and scanned their shop for air-conditioning equipment or gauges or leak detectors. The majority of the shops always buy the cheapest they could get but not all.
I volunteer to test their leak detector using my reference leak bottle from Bacharach. Of course every shop has one of these don’t they or even no one exists to tester instruments ???.
Eight out of 10 shops refrigerant leak detectors fail this test. And even after I show the shop technicians and owners their leak detector is not sensing enough to find a small leak they won’t spend the money to buy a new one because it’s good enough when they pick up a refrigerant cap and a leak detector makes a noise therefore it must be working. Lol

I volunteer to use a refrigerant analyzer as I’m working on the vehicles sitting there on the vacuum pump and I go hook up to the recharge recovery and recycling machine take a sample nine out of 10 fail with contaminated refrigerant or high air content 100% fail on high moisture content when I use my refrigerant contaminant moisture sensor. As we all know they properly and often maintained their machines by replacing the filter dryers. NOT!!!

Then there’s the shops were they believe UV dye find leaks. Because it’s cheap and easy. But they buy the cheapest UV dye That barely Flores and use the weakest cheapest UV lights.
UV dye only finds big leaks immediately when you first injected, it’s only meant as a back up for leaks weeks, days, months later.
Some shops spend a little money sometimes a few hundred dollars on a really fancy nice looking space-age ray gun aluminum anodized UV LED light all the money was spent on the looks but it’s only that tiny little diode the technology the wavelength and the strength of the output that makes all the difference.

One of the best UV lights handheld battery rechargeable I ever found almost 2 decades ago was from a no-name company. In a cheap low plastic handle look like a cheap old Taiwanese one dollar toy. Had a simple rocker switch in it for on and off like a amp probe tester. A cheap circuit board that was mounted to the top and was only held together by a rubber grommet that would occasionally fall off exposing all the LEDs in the back of the circuitboard and wiring when it came apart in your hand. It was $170 almost 20 years ago it looks really cheesy you wouldn’t even second-guess on buying it because it’s appearance was so bad compared to all the big-name fancy aluminum and bodied machined UV flashlight.
But it was so bright and so powerful with UV light not the purple light you see with your eyes. It outperformed every other light I ever walked into a store or went to an expo and test it out.
Several years back some company bought them out and put cheap UVLED lights that look the same but did not nearly perform as well after that it sucked.
Experience and if technicians don’t have a reference tool a gold standard or a high bar to hold other tools against for testing or reference then they have no idea what is good or bad they just have to believe the fancy glossy advertisement paper and the sales man throwing a pitch.

There’s a reason I do not buy air conditioning tools sold on tool trucks like snap on or Mac or MATCO , or nearly anything geared towards automotive technicians because they mostly all suck poor performance don’t last long give you false readings.

 

Yup, screwdriver probably faster.

Looked that way to me too.

Say, you might have some insight into this weird bit in the 2010 repair manual:



The only way I can manage to read that is "if you run your compressor without warming it up, you might damage it, so you have to warm it up first, by running it".

What's your take on what the original Japanese was probably trying to say there?

 

When you find out the owner of that quote, let me know. Because I want to give them
Credit by including it on my signature.

 

that warm up compressor paragraph was mind boggling
Looks like a combination of bad Japanese translation and the individual translation knew absolutely nothing about cars or the words they were reading. Kind of like our American legislation passing rules and laws.

earlier sentence saying do not turn on the compressor with no refrigerant because it will cause damage this would be on a system so old and without any low pressure switch it makes me think of old clutch systems from the 60s and 70s.

Then the sentence that says turn on switch for two minutes to warm compressor before turning on compressor.
As if it was a residential unit that had a crank case heater installed in it that would literally physically warm up the compressor in cold weather to boil off the liquid refrigerant out of the compressor but we know this does not exist on cars.

Toyota is not immune a lot of manufacturers have reprint of old stuff and assign instructions to people who know nothing about automobiles or air conditioning that were ordered by upper management to write such article.
Sounds like upper management and supervisors in a dealership in charge of making decisions about cars when they can’t even fix their own.

 

Wait a minute I think I know who the author is we both do. He actually comment in this post.

 

Um, which quote?

The paragraphs shown in the image came straight from the repair manual.

The person saying he couldn't make heads or tails of them? That was me.