Aircon leaks and all that jazz!

Rambling from the Sage of Oxford
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Charles
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Aircon leaks and all that jazz!

Post by Charles » Sat May 21, 2016 1:10 pm

Having spent the last few weeks dealing with various things on the car, I finally got round to sorting out the aircon.

For the last year or so I have known that the system has a small leak such that after about 3 months, enough gas has disappeared to make the aircon non-functional. We've been through the UV dye route but try as we might, we simply could not find where it was escaping.

So, when I was in having the tracking done at a local place to me last weekend, the chap plugged the aircon into their machine and established that there was a tiny leak based on how it held vacuum. He suggested using a leak product - here - and it went in this morning, along with a new load of R134a

Time will tell but, in the meantime, I realised that I had almost forgotten how nice it is to have cold air blowing out. At least that means the compressor and condenser are working correctly so fingers crossed that the Italian gear does the trick too.

Has anyone else had any experience of this stuff?
Charles
Teacher of Chemistry and driver of ALPINAs - not necessarily in that order ;)
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E24man
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Post by E24man » Sat May 21, 2016 7:42 pm

I have been very lucky with air-con in all my cars.

The E39 and E38 came to me with working air-con and its stayed working.

The E34 air-con hadn't worked after several years of non-use and so after a check over was vacuumed down, re-oiled, re-charged and continues to work 5 years later.

The M635CSi wasn't working when I bought the car ten years ago but I got it converted from R12 to R134a about seven years ago; just the valves were changed but with new oil and new gas and it's still good all these years later - not bad for a 31 year old car.

Just two weeks ago I decided to tinker with my 34 year old 635CSi. It had never been charged in my 18 years of ownership and for several years the electronic heating and cooling went a bit awry as the heater valve and the temperature dial started failing intermitently. After fixing those the car was off the road for six years due to a lazy paint sprayer and then two years ago I started getting it back in shape again. It had always appeared t hold some gas so I got a local mobile air-con engineer out to see if it would vacuum down successfully and to our amazement it did :shock:

A re-oil and a re-gas and I have chilly air in a 34 year old car!

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John_C
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Post by John_C » Sun May 22, 2016 2:48 pm

I had some leak-stop stuff added to my AC on a Volvo 850 I owned many moons ago, it worked a treat, AC was still ice cold two years later when I sold it.
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