Gen 1 AC Refrigerant Refill Tips

On another note I also picked up a new Autophix OM129 Scanner for $65.99 from Amazon. I contacted the seller to confirm it reads the 2002 Toyota Prius since they claim it reads most vehicles . It recognized the Prius has the ISO-9141-2 protocol, and I ran it several times on my vehicle this morning. There are no DTCs showing up, thus no issues appearing in the car at this time, nothing that would alert to my AC system improperly cooling according this scanner. The car is sitting in some shade at the moment at 10am and the AC is blowing some cool air but it’s not akin to “brand new AC cool air.”

I’m uploading photos of the scanner I purchased and read-outs of the test this morning.

 

A fun thing to do with a new non-Toyota scan tool is to create some conditions that produce known codes, and see how many of the codes it will see.

For example, your HVAC will always report a B1421 code if the car is in the dark at the time (or you toss a sock over the round sensor on the right side of the dash up under the windshield). Does this scanner pick up that code?

 

Well, I’m curious too. I’ll check it out, thanks for the tip.
When my water pump out in 2017... I was on the hunt for a code reader and was of the belief there were no handheld affordable readers out there that would read my Prius when my neighbor showed up with a dime store plastic reader, an Actron, and I said “it won’t work.” He said to try it and it quickly made a fool of me when it threw a P3130 code for the water pump on the Prius. I felt like a complete dummy but I was grateful. I’ve still got the photo now that I think about it for anyone wanting to investigate this other code reader.

 

Engine codes are somewhat standardized ... so are brake codes, SRS, etc. Commodity readers are more likely to pick up those. It's the ones stored in weird other Prius computers the tool doesn't even know exist....