Air conditioning dilemma

There has been quite a few threads about AC systems in the Gen 2 threads lately. Try searching around. A lot of good information to be had.

 

Step one would be..why did it stop working? There's many more things that can happen than just compressor failure. Determining the root cause would be the starting point. Did they provide a report with any pressure information etc? If refrigerant leaked out due to a condenser leak, that doesn't mean everything needs to be replaced. Hole in a hose doesn't mean everything needs to be replaced. A bad switch? many things can lead to it not working. Were there any codes? If they provided you with any paperwork, could you post it?
What symptoms did you have leading up to it not working?

 

115k is a short life for a compressor. But a owner of a car who does not stay on top of maintenance Automatically recharging a/c every couple of years or as soon as the first since of the a/c not started not cooling good. After that the compressor life is greatly reduced.

 

Hi. If I get you right, you're saying to keep the AC system in good shape, one needs to as a precaution, recharge the system once a year or so??

 

At least every two to three years. Or at the at the vary first sine the dash is getting not as cool. Because this means the compressor is started to over heat due to the lack of oil return and lack of refrigerant return to the compressor.
This is how compressors burn out. Because every car loss of 1 oz or more each year

 

That’s not always so. Toyota’s bulletin T-SB-0083-13 Rev1, “A/C System Diagnosis After Component Failure” (PDF), kindly posted here in 2015 by @shawn.ne, instructs technicians to check for debris, first in the compressor inlet and outlet lines, and if debris if found there, in other locations, and to replace different groups of parts depending on the results. The procedure in the bulletin could have been written more clearly, but as I understand it, if no debris is found, only the compressor itself needs to be replaced.

I imagine this bulletin reflects Toyota’s engineering judgment, since it also applies to warranty repairs done at their expense, and for which they bear the risk of further repairs, if the replacement parts were to be damaged by debris remaining in the system.

I’m not sure this would be effective.

Mobile Air Conditioning Society Worldwide writes in its Certification Training Manual (PDF), “Most A/C system manufacturers recommend that flushing not be performed. Open vent flushing often will not remove debris from a system. Connecting flush equipment to the system service ports, even with the valve cores removed, will not provide adequate system flushing, and may not result in the removal of debris and other substances. Many A/C system manufacturers consider the use of in-line filters to be an effective method of trapping debris.”

Toyota, however, writes in the Technician Handbook for Course T752, Air Conditioning and Climate Control (available by subscription to techinfo.toyota.com), “Aftermarket inline filters are commonly available in the market, however, they are not recommended by Toyota” for several reasons.

 

Flushing to remove old clean or dirty oil out of lines and hoses with out mufflers is good.

Trying to flush old dirty condenser or evaporator with metal fakes is a no go, waist of time.

Can not flush through a expansion valve. No ifs ands or buts about it.

Filtering is not a cure all. Filter after a flush out and component have been replaced only to catch what little was not cleaned out after flushing.

Problem with filter is human error on installing causing leaks at fittings. Wrong size filter. Wrong placement of filter.

Your parallel micro Channel condenser is the best first filter placed directly after the compressor !!!...

What is done for warranty repair is saving money and will it last long enough to get out of warranty is most important. NOT that it was done right. This is their engineering.

It’s all about clean it. Cleaning it again. Cleaning it one more time.

NEVER letting the oil get saturated with moisture from being exposed to the air!!!...

Vacuum below 500 microns more is better 100 or 200 microns would be best.

Compressor easily last 30+ to 50 years + if no out side force is responsible for killing them. Unless manufacturers defect ( vary rare) or poor design or placement.

Oh yea, NEVER LETTING THE REFRIGERANT GET LOW THAT CAUSED THE COMPRESSOR TO GO OUT IN THE FIRST PLACE. Lol

 

I don’t agree with just charging the system every 3 years. Never heard of that.

My bought new 07 is very cold it is used every single day since purchased new. I routinely clean the condenser and the under dash ecoil.

My other car is even older and has never had any work done on the ac and is very cold.

Only time you need refrigerant is if it’s got a leak and not cooling well.

The dealer has never heard of that either or they would be all over you every time they see a 3 year old car.

 

Of course you or most TECHs don’t even know.
Yes there are exceptions to the averages. ( my moms 1972 mustang after 20 years still had a full refrigerant charge - about 2 oz and occasional but not very often I come across a vehicle 8 or 10 years old with a full charge because I weighed every oz that comes out. On not hundreds not thousands but now going into 10s of thousands of cars.

On old cars in the 1958 when my dad was young and up to the 70s we only had three main dominant compressors that weighed 35 pounds made out of iron on slow revving V-8 engines oh there was that aluminum Tecumseh. The refrigerant charge on the old vehicles was between 3 pounds to 5 1/4 pounds. So if you lost 1 to three oz a year no big deal. Plus vary slow RPM of the compressor and 35lb iron or aluminum heatsink with 6oz of oil in the sump with a oil pump, cross drilled crank shaft just like a car engine.

Today that’s all gone. Small lightweight if in the palm of your hand compressors with under size pulley to overspin on a small shaft smaller than a pencil riding on small needle bearings as small as a dine. Instead of big old silver dollar weighting a quarter pound.

This is why with a small electronic compressor with Electric motor windings generate as much he is 1000 W electric home heater and it relies on a full charge of refrigerant that gets dumped on to the electric windings to keep it cool and stop cooking oil also.

This is why on a small system with only 400 to 500 g when it short by 60g or 90g after the refrigerant leaves the evaporator it goes into a superheat stage and lacks the ability to cool. At this point you still have perfect cooling ability out of the evaporator the passengers will feel no difference at all but the compressor will start to go into a overheat stage and progressively gets worse as the refrigerant level goes down shortening the life for the compressor until eventual destruction.

As the refrigerant level drops even lower there’s not enough mass of refrigerant to actually complete the carrier action of picking up the lubricant and keeping it in suspension like an aerosol spray out of a WD-40 can. The oil leaves the compressor passes the expansion valve drops into a low pressure low velocity the oil droplets drop out of suspension and start clingging to the sides of all the metal components. As the vapor refrigerant returns without the oil to the compressor it’s an excellent solvent that likes to pick up the oil out of the compressor remove it and deposit it into the evaporator on the low side lines. And this continues until destruction.

This is why when I technician remove the compressor that died a slow death of low refrigerant it often has no oil in the compressor when they go to do the oil balance. The very low percentage of technicians who even know that you have to do an oil balance when changing a compressor. Because it’s stuck all up inside the evaporator waiting for a fresh charge of refrigerant to put it back into a solution and distributed throughout the air conditioning system.

And this is what happens when there’s no recommended or required education to become a technician in automotive field when it has to do with air-conditioning ignorance is bliss. And people start to speculate and gas and try to use their limited logic and lack of fit knowledge of physics and gas laws in thermodynamics and start throwing a bunch of BS out there on the forms. Or their book scholars who do nothing but read but no practical hands-on experience and what little they have is considered nothing.

That’s why when you’re getting your bachelors in HVAC is a 2 1/2 year course with full five day a week entire semester courses. At best and automotive technician went to sequoia Institute or WyoTech and out of the nine month course, air conditioning was only two weeks looking through 70 pages of information basically learning how to hook up some hoses blow and go and get cold out the dash. And you wonder why there’s so much bad information written down in magazine articles in automotive journals in on tech forms.

 

That's a ranting wall of text from someone who appears to repair air conditioning for a living. The condescending and insulting statements towards all the uneducated owners and mechanics makes it difficult to accept or trust this advice.

My 2005 Prius, at 1oz/yr, has presumably lost 14oz (397g, 87%) of its 16oz (454g) of its refrigerant. The tragedy of losing 90g in my system would have kicked off over a decade ago. My 1997 BMW has lost 22oz (623g, 75%) of its 29oz capacity. It was down 180g over 15 years ago.

Yes, you see many failed A/C systems that us ignorant owners do not properly maintain. We only see our own handful of vehicles that rarely or ever need air conditioning repair or maintenance. It seems that everybody here has skewed and limited samples.

Let's look at the bigger picture.

It isn't our fault! Toyota's maintenance schedule does not appear to include any air conditioning maintenance if you exclude the annual cabin air filter cleaning. I haven't seen air conditioning recharge maintenance in the maintenance schedule of any vehicle I have owned.

I'm certain that there are many people with more advanced degrees than an HVAC bachelors involved in the design and manufacture of our vehicles.

We would be unable to maintain our blissful ignorance if the failure rate was as significant as you state as 10-16 million vehicles have been sold annually since the 1970s. The world would have responded in several ways. All the car repair forums would be littered with posts discussing their failed air conditioning systems. A/C training enrollment would skyrocket as a lucrative technician market would emerge. Manufacturers would be including air conditioning checks in their maintenance schedules. Class action lawsuits would be filed against manufacturers.

 

There’s lotta good air-conditioning that take of abuse and keep on ticking even though there’s some that shouldn’t they beat all the odds just like there’s still 73 pintos going around with a quarter million miles on them and their owners keep them in good condition but we all know there are exception to the rule. There is never any lawsuits going over the Ford’s FX 15 compressor failures nobody in automotive industry would say a word they were too busy making money off of it that’s the reality of this business.

As for condescending towards ignorant owners of mechanical shops HELL YES 100% because they are the ones that are directly responsible for incompetent technicians 100%.
When you take a young impressionable gullible beginning technician and you put them in the hands of an uneducated owner where profit is his number one goal bad things start happening and just like that old phrase a turd rolls downhill unfortunately with most but not all the lack of education gets transferred to who could be someday in the future be a great technician but they get destroyed and often disgruntled and leave the field after working for two or three bad employers in a row I’ve seen it 1000 times. And I’ve worked under two of them in my earlier years.

As for owners ignorance that’s because the mechanical shops are untrained and don’t possess the knowledge to inform their customers and educate them to prevent them from having very expensive future repair bills at least on the air-conditioning side. Certain manufacturers compressors are immune to such problems because they’re lower revving and they contain oil sunp pumps inside of them with an oil reservoir that help self protect them even under low refrigerant conditions.

Infinity had it in their manual every five years take your vehicle in do you have your desiccant dryer bag replaced at that time you would be getting a recharge. Couple of Ferrari models were actually kind of ridiculous and stated you had to have your AC done every year but then some of those models had tons of rubber hose going from the front of the car to the rear of the car and for every foot of rubber hose you had you had a certain quantity of refrigerant loss.

As for any manufacture to add annual or biannual air conditioning recharge that add cost to their maintenance against their competition in that ever increasing fight to lower annual maintenance cost is a selling point of a vehicle so long as you can get it out of warranty it’s OK for the failures to start it’s a money thing it’s no secret in our industry.

Yes there is many more manufacturers and engineers with far superior and higher educated degrees then HVAC and thermodynamics. And they steer clear of the HVAC side there’s easier and more profitable cats the skin.

As for a training and being a lucrative market that would be flooded This industry not gonna happen in the low paid and what are considered low manual labor jobs no big schools are going to market towards anything down at this end of the food chain. HVAC is right along there with the mystery of electricity why so few shops specialize in electrical anymore over the last three decades 90% of them closed up and went out of business they’re like shoe cobbler‘s that you would see in every local neighborhood when you were a kid walking down the streets and Kodak film.
But on the other hand on commercial HVAC it’s a booming industry and colleges and private institutions for the past decade have been gearing up for a multi billion dollar industry that has been taking over our nation and commercial buildings and servicing food franchises to keep their freezers up and running and with the new department of energy and building codes for strict energy efficiency the new HVAC systems in homes are becoming so complicated it’s demanding higher skilled and much better pay than automotive Industry. Automotive mechanics who are tired of being in the automotive trade who transfer over to the HVAC refrigeration commercial side of business make excellent technicians and they double to triple their salary.

I feel sorry for the young technicians who work in franchise shops in large corporate run chain stores who get that golden carrot dangled in front of them to meet quotas to make their bonuses to work on salaries that they cannot possibly live off of and when times get tough and they got a feed their family and I have to crunch the numbers and they don’t have time to properly diagnose let’s say your car might have some extra components or recommendations added that were never needed in the first place to put it mildly. Not to mention everyone usually has that one greedy service writer who always wants to pad his bonus at the end the month a little extra buy some so believable suggestions to the customer to add a little more and sometimes they just out right blatantly add a few extra lines onto the work order that the technician has written down and that’s a fact Jack they can take it to the bank.

There’s a lot a real good honest shops out there will try their best and education is at the top of our priority and they treat the customers cars as if they were they were their own or a family members. These are the shops we should all be looking for. These are the shops that I even recommend my own family members go to and I never have to second-guess a recommendation or hey Repair. And if there was a mistake made I know it was truly a mistake or a oversight and not just another way to scam a customer from these types of shops.

When you go into shops take notice he was just two examples.
1: The shop that either may be super clean and very polished or could be dirty but they have supersized menus many very unable to understand price ranges and options all geared towards fast production and pumping out the numbers. Either dead silence or you might have the beat bebop music or country music or anything else Payne playing in the background and employees are only interested in punching in exactly on time taking their brakes making their bonus moving really fast and punching out to go home and they all drive normal cars . More interested to get off to drink beers with their buddy go out to the movies play video games or family time is OK.

2: then there’s a second kind a shop and they may be very clean and polished or they may be a little dirty and disorganized.
But on the radio you may hear click and clack or other automotive related or engineering related radio shows playing in the background sometimes music. You may see computers on every toolbox. A couple of the younger employees may be off certain days well they’re attending a community college automotive course. The majority of those technicians who work there have modified vehicles whether they be old or new adding different computers adding fuel injectors to 1960s or 70s vehicles with a ECM they added so that they can program them self off a laptop. The owner goes out of their way for in-house training and promotes offsite training for their technicians. They don’t have that golden carrot to work there young guys to 120% of the speed of their capacity to work to try to get that bonus. The technicians are into tinkering with the latest SelecTronics and electric water pumps in modifying battery packs on there or their families electric vehicles on their off hours you’ll see them working in the shop on the weekend or early in the morning or after hours.

Tell me what shop would you rather send your vehicle or your mothers or another family member’s car to. Food for thought

 

I have being battling with a ford fusion 2010 today, after fixing a leak, the compressor couldn't work, because my sxantool could not activate the electric compressor for it to work.
Have you ever encounters such problems on Ford's? Their systems pretty much seems different from Toyotas.

 

Diagnosing through conversation or over a telephone can be sometimes difficult in this leading if even the slightest bit of information is overlooked or even the most dane in simplest little procedure is overlooked can lead you down a false deep rabbit hole.

The scan tool is the last thing I ever touch it is rarely barely ever needed. It’s better to study the system no the mode of operation know the difference between your signal activation source where it goes all the way up to your relay to turn on the high current high powered voltage source signal to engage your clutch on a standard mechanical clutch type system.

So are you saying the system will not activate the system clutch if you try to push the button on the dash ?

Are you very positive it was working before you actually physically seen the clutch in gauge prior to fixing the leak?.

Jump right to the relay are you getting signal to engage the relay

If not problem is upstream

If you are getting signal to the relay with your fingers or your ears very high tech in Porten tools much better than a scanner often do you feel or hear the click of the relay engaging yes? or no?

Even if yes you can have corroded pitted or highly oxidizing contact points that are not allowing the high current voltage to pass to engage the clutch

Jumped a high current path from the B 12 that is supplied to the relay to the terminal that goes down to the wire that feeds the clutch it should engage ?

If after jumping to high current and you have the plus clutch does not engage is it the wiring is it the connector did a rat you through the ground side is the fuel coil bad for the magnetic clutch inside the pulley several things to check all very simple .

Is there a piece of information here I’m not getting or don’t know by being at the vehicle by not putting my hands on it therefore I do not know and possibly all the information I gave you is Noll and void.

The scan tool is the last tour you use. Your hand your eyes your ears and the gray matter between your ears Oh yeah sometimes your nose

 

Thanks for the reply. The AC system was functional when it came. It only had a leak that has being rectified, after we did evacuation.
But we've noticed if, unlike Prius where you can be charging the system with refrigerant when you turn on the AC buttons, for the ford fusion hybrid, it does seems not be the case. Each time the AC system button was turned on from the cabin, the blower brings in just air from the vents, and cool one.
I don't think you can activate the compressor via the clutch like you suggested, because its a high voltage electric compressor, so one should not try that.

 

So this was the information about it being a hybrid electric compressor that I was not aware of. Therefore everything above I said is Null and void and does not apply.
And this is my fault for not reading thoroughly every single word and all the sentences but I was just glancing as I was driving because that’s basically my only free time between driving to the next job site.

Tell me you’re not trying to activate the compressor well it’s under a vacuum ?

And if you properly evacuated the system down below 500 µm you do not need to start the vehicle to charge the system the entire charge if you know how to use physics on your side and the gas laws will entirely charge the vehicle without ever starting it if not you’re doing something wrong watch some of my videos on my YouTube channel about charging.

Where was the leak that you fixed could you have possibly accidentally disconnected and forgot to reconnect a wire or a sensor somewhere what is it the condenser under the bumper and the outside ambient air temperature is disconnected your scan tool should show a open or a code for the sensor not being connected or show a temperature like -40 something like that for example .

Again I am not getting the whole story here it feels like a piece of the information is missing or something was overlooked .

 

I just uploaded this part III video a quick recharge of any vehicle without turning on the compressor. When it comes to recharge in a vehicle in all reality maybe one out of 1000 vehicles because of a peculiar situation should you ever have to actually run the compressor to help pull in some refrigerant if everything was done properly. You’ll see in my video it takes roughly 30 seconds sometimes 60 seconds to completely charge vehicle with refrigerant.

 

Wao! Nice video there.
The leak on the Ford fusion hybrid was on one of the condenser hoses. Everything was evacuated.
By the way, I like your digital tools. That makes the job sweet.
Could you make a list here on the digital manifold gauge, and some stuffs and brands of vacuum pump you're using?
Nice job dude!

 

if you visit my profile and look at my photo albums with lots of descriptions of tools i use

manifold is SM480V fieldpiece
you can go to their web site fieldpiece.com
bluetooth sensors JobLink app softwear by fieldpiece
large vacuum 12 CFM NAVAC NRD16T
H-10 refrigerant leakdetector
small vacuum pump fieldpiece 8 CFM VP85
TruTech tool TruBlu Professional kit with BluVac+Pro
recovery unit Feildpiece MR45

Most all the a/c tools sold to automotive are low ball want to be pretend tools. for the cheap and lazy crowd. That is what I have been told for decades by the commercial HVAC/R tool marketing and sales. They look down on us as the low end of the gene pool in the automotive trades. But I understand why.

all this and much much more I got at HVAC and Energy Auditing Tool Sales | Testo | Fieldpiece | TEC | Flir | TSI
this is my candy store. every time package come its like Christmas

I did not show in videos yet my TESTO advanced tools and measuring software I need to keep it simple and easy for the automotive crowd. elementary level. Take baby steps first learn to craw before riding 200HP racing bike
Later when I learn to use sound and video editing I will step it up on my commercial HVAC YouTube channel under my business name. But that is much later.

You can see more of my problem car a/c videos on my youtube t lech
no time to edit videos to make them look nice too busy too much work for that. I just pull out the phone and shoot run off to the next job. 7am to 7pm every day for the last 30 years +