What Kills Prius Compressors ? How to prevent it !

Yes you are exactly 100% right what I list off is what the book doesn’t mention.

There is so much the book dose not tell you it’s not even funny.

It’s sad to say but true , automotive books especially air conditioning were written for people with a below six grade average education.

But when you’ve done something over 40 years every day from morning tonight and watched a technology change and you were there from the beginning and the first make model introduced a new technology and you see it come to pass a decade or two later into the next generation. Do you see things in a different way and understand deeper face knowledge of the physics in the mechanics the science behind it’s working. Not to mention being formally educated and thermal dynamics and fluid dynamics in a degree of HVAC technology and commercial refrigeration.

I have been redoing and Re-repairing Air-conditioning from shops that have been in business for more than 30 years supposedly doing air-conditioning in Eaven specialty air conditioning and radiator shops who keep replacing the wrong parts and pushing the car out the door and then redoing it multiple times before it finally gets to me.

This is why when I started my own business 30 years ago we had nearly 30 radiator and air conditioning specialty shops in the San Francisco Bay Area. We now only have one. If you specialize in something you’re supposed to be so good and so profitable you can’t possibly go out of business. what’s that tell you what happened. Technology changed but the old dinosaurs did not.

Lead , follow or get out of the way
“ Lee Iacocca“

 

The simplest way that is not the most scientific is the way I explained putting my hand on the suction line down by the compressor. That is about as good as you’re going to get

There’s 100,000 shops that have no gauges I just have a can with the little hose and a little yellow green and red indicator and they call that a gauge and they do it every day and they released refrigerant to the atmosphere every day even though they know it’s not legal and they should not it’s all about the money.

 

I just see you are from Finland. Europe especially northern around Finland Sweden and Switzerland are much more advanced and more detailed with their training. Your education system in general and especially your trades schools are far superior than what we have here in the United States. Your education by ninth grade in Finland is equal to a college university degree here in the United States.

I met a few automotive technician from Finland very technical very analytical And trying to understand or speak Fin it’s like trying to understand an alien language from another world lol .

Compared to Finland or Sweden or Germany here in America there’s no requirement mandated for a trade school there’s no requirement for certification there’s no requirement or automotive education of any kind to open up and own a automotive shop. Learn on the job breaking things not all shops like this but many are. Here in the United States they nearly removed all the trade schools from high school, no more metal shop no more wood shop no more automotive shop no more advanced science classes. Basically our schools flip out burger flippers janitorial mop pushers.

 

Excellent job there now we’re cooking with some high-octane fuel .

As for black paint barbecue paint for your weber flat black.
It’s also Excellent to spray on the case of the compressor if you want to take non-contact with a thermal imaging camera I prefer thermal imaging cameras over the cheap little thermal IR temperature gauge.

 

Dr. Scholls is good for finding oil leak but has a high emissivity. It reflects heat. Reflects the reading of the infrared camera sensor to pick up.

Not as bad as a mirror or a polish piece of metal. Where are the polish piece of metal or mirror can be in front of you or off to an angle to the side and you and your infrared camera at the object you want to measure in the center and you have a very high intense heat source behind you radiating forward towards you from behind the infrared radiation strikes the reflective items to your left or to your right reflecting it like a mirror straight at you and the lens of your infrared camera throwing off your readings even though you have the camera facing forward to a small item that you want to take the measurement from. Infrared light bounces around like light.
And when using an infrared device they do not like very hot air or very cold air blowing around directly towards the face of their lens it causes a distortion that throws off your readings.

You can see examples of this on YouTube with guys doing air conditioning with an infrared thermometer pointing it directly down in the center Dash duct. As the temperature keeps decreasing from 40° to 38° to 28° to 17°F as they’re commenting how great the air-conditioning is working because they could get such low temperatures.
When in fact it’s the lensing distortion factor affecting the sensor in the front of the camera giving a false reading ever decreasing.

This is what happens when somebody is giving a good tool but does not understand its functions and its limitations. And environmental effects on its readings.

The same goes when using a IR sensor device for reading temperature the farther you pull it back from the item being measured the lensing surface area it was meant to read at a given distance increases in diameter.

Example if I was trying to take a temperature of a aluminum pipe that I painted black with a half inch diameter. In the specification for the diameter at 1/2 inch for my infrared temperature reading device was 12 inches away but I was taking a measurement from 16 inches away it would be skewed by having a larger diameter picking up whatever temperature was to the left and to the right behind it skewing the true temperature.

 

Here’s some continuation of the 2007 Prius the black one and the silver one.
From my previous videos more diagnosis to be done on the black one they just need to call her now if they choose to look for further problems that’s an option the customer will have to pay for further diagnosis.

All I can say is body shops are the root of all evil and mischief do not let body shops do mechanical repairs.

sorry I couldn’t give you all details in Dave’s videos made a few mistakes I was losing time and falling behind schedule had to rush them.