A/C maintenance

Welcome to PriusChat!!

Yes. Not sure if you can salvage it at this point, but try not to use it. Maybe @lech auto air conditionin can flesh out the particulars.

 

The oil that should be used is Denso ND-11.

The damage occurs over time, so you haven't caused irreparable damage. But, you will need to get the system evacuated, flushed, and then refilled correctly. Don't use the A/C until you do this.

The A/C shop should not use equipment on a Prius that has been used on other non-hybrids. They should have a separate equipment set that they only use on hybrids.

 

You took it to a mechanic Who is supposedly should know better by now since the Prius has been around approaching 20 years.
Any mechanic he’s been around long enough to at least read off the original Babylonian stone tablets or papyrus paper hieroglyphs no you don’t swap out the two machines between a Prius and regular vehicles.
So either the conventional mechanic has been living under a rock before the pyramids were built or can’t read past the kindergarten level.
Open the past history behind us now

Question one. When it was re-charged by the big machine did the AC turn on ? 2: and did it blow cold ?.
Once we get this answered we can move on from here. Because it never work you may have other problems.

So what would I do in this case if it was my vehicle and I had a little bit of mechanical ability to pull things apart. ?

A: You can do the old fashion pulling each piece apart and flushing it with a AC approved flushing solvents
The best you can do is pull the compressor off put it upside down to drain as much oil out of as possible use the cheap alternative aftermarket hybrid oil possibly pouring it back in the compressor and moving it around shaking it up and down emptying oil out two or three times to dilute the oil you possibly have in there to a very low possibly acceptable level.

B: you cannot flush through a expansion valve to clean The evaporator so don’t bother doing anything with that.


If you were a shop and you had access to refrigerant flushing appointment where you can literally forcefully blow in five or 10 pounds of liquid high-pressure refrigerant into one port at the same time pulling it out and recovering it under a liquid high-pressure through another port would dilute down the ratio of remaining oil in the system to probably a acceptable level.

But unfortunately liquid flush refrigerant equipment is expensive barely ever used and next to no shops on such equipment.
But I do.

And you do not flush flush insolvent through a compressor.

Your best hope is to do anything that could possibly reduce the quantity on the wrong oil in the system down to a minimum but as long as he did not add PAG oil into your system . Minute small quantity that would be just in hoses and possibly trace amounts in his recycle refrigerant though not the greatest situation not the end of the world either.

I do remember when PAG Oil was first introduced and spilling it and getting it on some of my plastic equipment and some binders that I have papers stored the plastic all got brittle and fell apart from the PAG oil exposure breaking down the plastic over time.

When I hear of mechanics in shops still using old refrigerant equipment on both regular cars and electric compressor cars in this day and age I get a picture in my minds eye of the boy in deliverance movie playing the banjo up on the porch.