Kung Fu Maintenance demonstrates how to charge an air conditioner through the suction side only by feel. Get KFM’s favored Multi-Meter here https://amzn.to/2l8W9CO
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OK, we’ve got an AC just barely cool in here. Kind of low on freon. Ompressor’s pretty hot to the touch. Unit’s still running.
It’s going to be charging up through the low side. You’ve got a tiny leak at the evaporator. So we’re going to be using a micro additive. Got our gauges calibrated.
We’ve got a couple of things we can make better. Got our new fan capacitor. We could secure that up. Make that better.
Make sure all our gauges are turned off here. And I’ll remove the cap on the low side. It’s blazing hot today. Probably 109 degrees out here today.
Just going to try to get this going and get off the roof. It’s pretty humid today too, so not the easiest day to be up here. Looks like the Schrader valve cap needs to come out with the cap. It’s kind of stuck on the end there.
Make sure we recover that. There’s our o-ring. Put that back in the cap for later use.
Now we’re going to hook up our quick connect fitting. This is a low loss fitting. Prevent frostbite. Want to wear gloves. Wear safety glasses.
Now we can check our reading up top. See what our pressures are. So we’re showing at about 30, which means we’re just a little bit low. And purge the line.
Make sure all the valves are tight here. Pick up our refrigerant can at the end. Got my can of refrigerant up here. Going to set it up top and run the middle line.
Charging port hooks up to the tank of refrigerant. OK. Open the line.
And back down here, we’re going to go ahead and purge. Purge the line. Purge both sides. Now we’re ready to charge.
Now, because the compressor is really hot, I’m going to dump some cold water. All I have today is cold water. And I actually prefer to use a little bit of ice to cool it down, speed up the charge. But I’ll be using the cold water instead.
So this has been in the fridge for a while. That will help speed the charge up. Going to monitor the line. It’s already starting to feel a bit colder. I’m monitoring it with my wrist here.
What we wanted is for this line here that goes down to the evaporator. And the temperature at the evaporator will start to backtrack up this line to the compressor. This is the suction line. It’s why we’re sucking in the refrigerant there from our tank up top here.
But what I have is capillary tube system at my evaporator coil. And the capillary tube system is a metering device that only lets so much refrigerant through at a time. Now the deal is, the temperature of the evaporator coil needs to be about 40 degrees, which is above freezing. You know, water freezes at 32 degrees. So just keeping that coil temperature up above that amount will mean that our coil is not going to freeze up, and we’re going to be removing heat from inside the unit.
Now as the evaporator coil reaches its 40 degree temperature, it’ll back up into this line. So this low side line is nice and chilly. And that’s going to tell us that our evaporator is that cold also. So that’s how we can kind of monitor and charge this unit up, charge it to where we need it to be.
Again, with the capillary tube system, it’s pretty forgiving. You’d have to really try to overcharge it. Obviously, you don’t want to overcharge it. You want to avoid overcharging.
But again, it meters the refrigerant at a fixed orifice rate. It’s a fixed size. Only lets so much refrigerant through at a time.
Post time: Jun-02-2017