Troubleshooting A/C - No cooling - Fan runs

Maybe it just needs some refrigerant

 

If you check and it's low or empty, then it leaked out. Since you are not the original owner/driver of this car and don't know it's complete history, you would have to see if this is just normal occurrence or if there's a massive leak somewhere (from a front end accident). But you should first check if there's refrigerant

 

Head on over to @lech auto air conditionin profile and read everything he's written... He's a great teacher and goes into a great level of detail. You'll learn a huge amount of stuff from him and will likely get a sense of some of the best equipment you'll want to invest in for your future HVAC/R career! The amount of refrigerant in the system has to be precisely measured in Prius because its a variable pressure system and people who blindly add more refrigerant end up killing the compressor fairly quickly.

 

Yep you sound like somebody who is fresh out of HVAC/R1st semester 101 classes. . Congratulations you’ve picked a decent career if you stay in the commercial end of it on refrigeration you’ll make good money and there will always be mandatory overtime 60 hours or 70 hours or even 80 hours a week but expected go through a divorce.

But other than that most likely you’re low on refrigerant if your dad was the original owner and it’s never been recharged and it’s a 2006 that’s where I would lay my money down on a bet.

Of course you want to recover the refrigerant through the low side service port not the high side if you’re going to do this yourself

Throw it on a vacuum pump for a minimum of an hour and if you’ve learned in class about a micron gauge throw that on there and if you have the vacuum pump at home let the vacuum pump run overnight the longer the better.

This is the age at where Prius sometimes start to develop a leak in the evaporator coil

But I would say seven out of 10 times at this age the condenser is the first culprit who leaks first.

Look for some gray or dark shadows in a semi circular configuration in one or more locations on the condenser look at my photo albums I have pictures and explanations.

You can go to my YouTube channel many different vehicles including commercial large LG heat recovery unit VFR Systems that I sell and install so I work in both ends of the world the automotive and the heavy duty commercial. Here’s a link to my YouTube channel on a 2007 Prius I have many videos of other Prius spread throughout my YouTube channel over the last year plus

Have any questions just send me a message

 

Lots of G2 ac posts now.

Pray it’s not the ecoil under dash. Like mine lol….$$$$

 

Wow, didn't know you had a YouTube channel? And over 1200 subscribers too! I look forward to learning more from you videos!

 

But unfortunately I have no time for editing my videos or setting up tripods carrying around a GoPro or hooking up a microphone for a good audio that all takes time and I have too much work to make nice clean steady clear sounding videos.

I often only give a little bit of information in each video leaving out a bunch of important facts but may be five or six video later I will mention something I left out in previous videos bits and pieces of information scattered throughout all my videos

I try to at least turn on my phone camera at one shop per day if I possibly can and take some quick little videos broken up into little parts on a individual vehicle.

I did buy a tripod actually to two extra cameras a boom microphone and a lapel microphone and a bunch of extra lights to be placed at different angles for good lighting.

I tried that for about a week and I was late because of all the extra time I’ve set up to many jobs people calling me asking me where I was I missed a bunch of jobs every day just because of that trying to do YouTube videos.
And that’s not even to mention trying to use the software takes time for good editing

Just in time in los jobs I was losing $250-$400 every day I try to do YouTube videos.

So now all my camera gear sits in a pile stacked in a room never to be used again during my work hours.

 

You could probably find a kid learning video editing to do filming and some simple editing for $100 each time they stopped in if you kept it real simple for them so they could learn to refine their skills.

 

Yes I thought about that for college kid majoring in video toggery fee or video editing.

I don’t think he can hang with my 6:30 AM to 7 PM daily schedule after not stopping for lunch eating it in the car no breaks.

Sometimes making emergency calls late in the day when I’m just getting off to go up start a commercial air conditioning unit get it running be there till 930 or 10:30 PM wake up the next morning and start it all over again.

When I first took my two younger brothers out to learn the trade with me they left their small town of willits to California drywall with me for one week and then I dropped him off back home

My dad called me up on Monday and asked what did you do to your brother he slept for 48 hours did that to both of them.

When my son came out with me he was nearly hitting 300 pounds in a size 48 waist when we were finished after the summer he was a size 34- 36 waist.

 

Wow... Hope you have a plan to not work so many hours as you get older... But I get it, living in San Francisco is super expensive. Hit me up if you ever need help moving to Oregon or Washington state, I've lots of great connections that could make the transition easier. Your cost of living will be way lower so you can have more free time to relax and enjoy your life. And as you can tell by the mind blowing heat dome up here a week ago that pushed Portland to 115 degrees, there's gonna plenty of work up here to keep the air cool because only 40% of the population have air conditioning in their homes. Of course that's about to change.

 

Florida we have 100% air conditioners in our homes….and cars. But pay sucks.

Case in point my main 7 year old Trane house have has a very slow leak. About every 2 years we call a great company in. They were here yesterday nice guy put a probe in the first outlet from the air handler and another probe in one of the returns uses Bluetooth to his phone hooks up the gauges says the charge looks really close.
I say they seem to always put a lb and half in it. Ok let’s try that my first outlet went from 66 degrees to 59 degrees. Bingo. Back to extremely cold.

The bill was $136. Lol…

meanwhile I’m looking up Trane 3 ton systems 14 seer ouch……they have gotten expensive. New company called Oxbox is listed as a Trane company little cheaper. Not a pos Goodman.

So Florida is tough to make a buck if you use tools to do it.

 

I work a lot because I’m a workaholic and I was always at wiry hyper active person who cannot stay still and do nothing. At 56 I still basically almost worked like when I was 18 and 21 except with some pains and things just don’t heal like they used to.

Are used to live in Port Orchard Washington state for two years lives right on the edge of the forest behind our house beautiful place I miss it.
Other than you only got to see the sunshine about 12 days a year where we lived and everybody had to wear sunglasses it was really strange coming from California.
Remember asking my stepmom when we enrolled my first day in school saying I think everybody up here is sick and maybe there’s some radiation leaking from the nuclear power plant because everybody is so pale and white

Still have some cousins and aunt and uncle that still live up in Washington state

 

Probes in the inlet and the return is not gonna tell him anything he’s only done about 1/4 of what he needs to do to do it right.
It’s a big scam in the residential HVAC with all these big companies hiring unqualified guys who don’t know what they’re doing give them some probes in a Bluetooth app so it looks flashy but the boss is an idiot and cannot even use the probes and selves or train their own employees.
But the customer doesn’t know that

(so basically they sent someone out there to scam you and just collect money for a service call) because he did not do his job.

He needs to stick conductive thermistor temperature clamps outside on the condenser at the discharge liquid line so he could read the sub cooling
He needs another temp sensor on the suction line so he could take the superheat

But only in combination with the pressure probes at the liquid and suction line at the same time

Then he needs the ambient air temperature probe set out at the side of the coil out of the direct sunlight where the air is being sucked in the side to get an accurate ambient temperature not too close to the top where the fan pushes out the hot air in case there’s any roll around.

Then he can check the level of your refrigerant and he would’ve been able to tell you you were low.
The way he did it he might as well just left the probes back in his truck and just put his hand on the suction line and kept filling it until it was beer can cold.

But even that would not be correct other than getting a cold because in Florida they use a lot of flex duct that is usually undersized and poorly run with lots of kinks and a lot of leakage.

So you could use all the probes in the world but airflow is king if the airflow is wrong so will be your readings.

That’s where the duct sizing formulas come in and taking static pressure comes in the play to set the tabs on your speed controller on the blower motor to correctly set the speed to get the correct airflow.

And because you live in a extremely humid area the rest of the nation airflow is somewhere around 400 CFM
But to reduce the humidity and get longer contact time over the evaporator coil to remove water out of the air you would slow your CFM to somewhere around 350 CFM some guys even push it down to 300/325 CFM in your Florida area.
And it doesn’t matter if you give the guys the tools to measure air flow if they were never trained how to do it correctly in the first place it goes back to guessing bells and whistle‘s smoke and mirrors.

As for $136 to make a service call like that here in San Francisco we would not even put our key in the ignition switch and do the paperwork for the service call for that price will go bankrupt.
For $136 you can get somebody who is currently using METH or recovering from METH addiction .
Or they hire the guys off the Home Depot parking lot throw a uniform on them and stick them in the van and send them out to your place
Or they hire somebody unknowledgeable who looks good talks nice doesn’t know anything and gives them some probes and trains them how to stick them in vents and charge the money.

I wonder if Brian Orb HVAC company services your area look them up here’s a link

https://youtube.com/c/HVACSchool

I think the name of his HVAC company is called Kalos