How screwed am I? >> recharged with leak stop and R134a

I did a stupid thing. Instead of charging only R134a into my 2010 A/C, I also added Supercool A/C Leak Stop + UV dye. The system seems to be working fine, but as I belatedly read that ND-11 oil is used.

How screwed an I?

here is the link to the product:
R134a Seal Leak Stop with UV Dye 4oz - TSI Supercool

This was only a couple days ago, so Maybe I can take some remedial action. For example: bleed about half of the refrigerant as liquid from the high pressure side into my recovery tank and then replace that with fresh R134a. That should remove some of the oils. If I remove half of the refrigerant each time after 4 cycles, I'll be down to 10% of the leak stop. I'd need to add back some proper oil to make up for what was removed. How crazy is this plan?

Another question.

Is the "conductivity" issue with the conventional PAG oils (v ND-11) due to them being hygroscopic (wet)? I'd think think there is a drier in the system.

In my residential HVAC with R410a and POE oil, the issue is water. In that system the windings of the motor are also exposed to the refrigerant. If it is "wet" then you can get electrochemical corrosion of the wires. The metal ions then released into the oil increase the conductivity further leading to compressor failure. Anyway, that's why after opening the system you replace the drier, keep it purged with dry N2 while working in it, and pull a good vacuum on it before recharging.

 

That is an interesting article. In note that Supercool is also mentioned. Maybe I am over thinking this. ND-11 is a POE oil. And the Supercool product uses 2 oz of "universal" POE. (see side panel below) On the other hand, the initial oil charge for the compressor is 4 oz ND-11, so now it is 1/3 Supercool "universal" POE and 2/3 ND-11. I do believe that dose makes the poison, meaning that the system should be able to tolerate some contamination.

Anyway, I just got off the phone with an engineer at Supercool. He told me the product was fine with the hybrid electric compressors. So maybe I'm OK after all.

I understand the concept of the HECAT flush. That basically does a liquid solvent flush. Sounds like a great system!

 

I weight the R134a out of a 30 lb cylinder. I was hoping to just top it off instead of recovering and doing a complete recharge. However it looks like that's what I need to do. I feel a lot better after talking to the Supercool Engineer.

The original issue is that it didn't have a lot of cooling capacity and the sight glass didn't show much liquid. And it has been blazing hot here.

 

A follow up. It has been 4 months. My A/C is working fine. My gauges also have never been used with PAG oils, only R410A POE and R22 mineral oil. Next time I mess with it, I'll do a recovery and recharge so I can weight in an accurate charge. Honestly, I was hoping to get some cold air out of the A/C by just goosing it with a little R143A and judge by the sight glass. That worked.

 

A couple thoughts about that.

1) I think any refrigerant the shop recovers, just goes to recycling. I am pretty sure it is not legal for the commercial shop to put the recovered refrigerant into another customer's system. If there is contamination they could trash that second system. I suppose it is possible they have some system to clean it up, but that's a whole process in itself. I think they could only put it back in the same system system it came out of, although I don't think they would. But you can do that in your own Obviously don't reuse refrigerant from a burned out system.

2) You want to be careful separating the recovery and recharge operations. Recovery will leave the system at negative pressure. That should be less of a problem if you plan to further evacuate the system when you get home. To do it right you need to pull a good vacuum on the system. My gauge set has four ports, high side, low side, one for vacuum and another for the refrigerant tank. I always have the refrigerant hooked up already so I can quickly switch from evacuation to filling. You are right about the oil. You need to watch the sight glass in the gauge to make sure the oil is not foaming. I have not tried this on the Prius, but I have found some old R-22 systems were pretty foamy and I needed to throttle the evacuation to minimize that. I don't think the POE is particularly foamy, but anytime you have refrigerant dissolved in the oil, it will bubble out when you evacuate.