Help with AC Please. 2009 Prius. Blowing not cold air.

Stay away from CO2 that is what’s considered a dirty wet gas the last thing you would want to use next to using wet shop compressed air.
The other problem is CO2 gas it expands and contracts too much to do a reliable or any kind of field overnight pressure testing . It’s like refrigerant as the temperature goes up on the gas the pressure goes up when the temperature goes down the pressure goes down you would not know if you had a leak .

Nitrogen at our atmosphere pressure and at the temperatures that as humans existing is not affected by rising and falling pressures in a small system with a small temperature swings that are human bodies exist that.
The kind of leaks were are looking for are the ones what will cause you aggravation over a period of weeks or months.
The big leaks that most people are thinking about can easily be found the backyard do it yourself mechanic way add some refrigerant to the system and start squirting everything down with soapy water at all your fittings and joints.
The problem with refrigerant is that the pressure can only get as high as the ambient temperature example. If I put 1 ounce or 10 ounces of refrigerant into your system and it was 70° outside the pressure cannot exceed 70 psi .
Now if I magically picked up that car that I just put refrigerant and dropped it into the middle of the Arizona desert on a stretch of blacktop on 115° day. That very same few ounces of refrigerant would expand and increase in pressure up to 158 psi because all the hoses and pipes condenser and evaporator and compressor would all be the same temperature 115°F .
Now think of the scenario we have our gauges hooked up whether this was refrigerant CO2 does The same thing but at a different rate. We have a gauge is hooked up and we’re going to let it sit overnight to test if we have a leak. Now that we’re in this desert and we know some deserts could get nearly freezing cold at night in the other extreme we come out to our car in the morning and it’s 40° outside. You look at your gauges sitting on your car hooked up to your air conditioning system and it reads 35 psi. Wow we have a big leak. No the gas has just contracted condensed down to that pressure when it gets that cold.

This is why you use inert noble gases that are nearly rocksteady within a wide temperature band that we live on this planet earth nitrogen is barely affected.

The kind a leak that we look for that will aggravate you and cause your system to lose refrigerant over a period of weeks or months causing your compressor to overheat but still give you some cooling and shorten your compressor life you cannot possibly see using a set of analog gauges finding leaks using pressure drop using analog gauges is only for a very large huge leaks that are easily found.

When there’s a lot of dollars at stake because you have $1000 or $2500 AC compressor on the line that you may lose or you were just doing a Mercedes-Benz that took 21 hours of labor to get to the evaporator and before you put that dash back together do you wanna really make sure it’s not leaking so you don’t have to rip it all apart again and do it a second time for free. when there’s a lot of dollars at stake because you have $1000 or $2500 AC compressor on the line that you may lose or you were just doing a Mercedes-Benz that took 21 hours of labor @ $180 a hr, to get to the evaporator and before you put that dash back together do you wanna really make sure it’s not leaking so you don’t have to rip it all apart again and do it a second time for free. So you could perform a vacuum decay leak test which is the least reliable using a micron meter overnight which reads vacuum leakage down to the thousands of a psi that could not possibly be seen or even move a analog needle. And the problem with vacuum testing is the pressure difference between atmospheric pressure in a vacuum is only 14.7 psi.

Then we perform a high-pressure dry nitrogen decay test. Add 150 psi only with a very precise pressure gauge that is accurate within the 10th of a psi and is not affected by temperature swings that most gauges and digital gauges are affected by throwing their calibration off giving you a false reading. And the gauges are barometric compensated they actually read the outside barometric pressure so if one day is clear and sunny and then a storm front comes in a high-pressure or low-pressure will actually affect your readings a good set of micron gauges will compensate for this and give you a true reading.

This is why if somebody went out and just bought any old plain micron gauge or pressure gauge and they don’t even know what its limitations are and don’t understand the specifications they’ll be running in circles chasing their tail looking for a leak that is not even there or saying that the gauges don’t work and they don’t understand why they’re seeing the numbers that are changing in front of them that do not make sense.

When buying these types of tools you cannot believe advertisement you cannot believe the salesman you cannot believe the marketing team most of the time especially in the automotive industry that’s considered bottom end feeders. That are easy for salesman to convince to buy tools that are not even qualified for the job they’re doing but because their flashlights and make a beeping sound sold by big companies and have glossy colored fancy literature with a lot of technical terms and certificates of calibration means that tool must be good.

 

I would switch to the second 12oz can. there always will be some left on the first can. I believe this is because now the pressure you have in the system is close to the pressure on the can. If you weighted before and after you will know how much went in. If not weight the second one and assume both had the same weight gross. Then weight the half empty first can to find out how much went in the system already. Do the same with second can later.

 

I have always had problems getting the can to empty. It gets cold and just evens out on pressure. Easiest way I have ever found is to put it where it’s hot, like next to the radiator on my 4 runner. Never charged my Prius so I don’t know where it gets hot under the hood

 

Wrapping a towel around it insulates the can from warming up. The can get really cold when it starts filling up the system.
Heat, heat, heat.

 

I think you should see if the AC compressor will run now.

 

1. This is my understanding of the work you have done so far: You replaced the compressor, condenser, dryer.
2. You did not replace the inverter.
3. The system behaves the same as in your post 1.
4. What DTC is logged now?
5. It is possible that the inverter still needs to be replaced.

 

I don't know, see if you can retrieve any DTC related to the air conditioning system.

Well, you would have to expose the three-phase AC wiring from the inverter to the AC compressor. If you could do that safely while bypassing any interlocks, then you could measure the AC voltage.

To measure the current you could use a clamp multimeter to measure the current in one wire. That is a specialty meter which most hobbyists have not invested in. This is what I use:
Fluke 365 Detachable Jaw True RMS AC/DC Clamp Meter | Fluke

 

Generally you have the compressor running to have the low side low enough to suck the Freon in. If the compressor is not on all you can do is reach equilibrium with the can.