Air Conditioning for a cooler Wellington. Cooler summer, dryer Winter
Upgrade time with the purchase of a new AC servicing station loaded with features. Our Weltec friend Adrian has been it to give us all a refresher course. Now loaded with the equipment to assess most faults with HVAC and AC systems, scan tools to provide code reading and live data, Thermal gun provides a great visual tool for our temperatures of high and low pressure circuits, temperature drops across condensers etc and of course the AC station for Recovery, recycling, vacuuming and refilling of systems.
Charging station put to work while we got schooled up on the new equipment. It was a bit of an eye opener as to how forgiving some cars are, we selected 4 cars, My car pictured, a BMW loan car, a customers Tiguan and a staff members Suzuki. All 4 cars fundamentally were cooling the cars, and exhibited no faults, IE, no electrical issues detected with the scan tools, codes etc. Thermal gun and touch test of the high and low pressure pipe work as expected, Ie, frosty cold and very hot. Temps across condensers acceptable and all cars were cool at the vents. (not freezing cold but definitely cooling). And the gauge pressures were with-in acceptable ranges…. However as we were training on the new equipment, all cars we degassed and the extracted amounts across all of them were 1/3 to 1/2 below the manufacturers specs.
As I said above, forgiving, however as we found out, they were working but no where near as effective as they could be and were about to be…. After a vacuum of the system and a recharge of the systems, all 4 cars had a considerable drop in temp at the vents. BMW loan car as an example we removed 330grams from the system which should have had over 700. Once recharged we saw as low as 1.5degrees at the vents..
All cars were tested for leaks, all were ok, all held a vacuum for our test period. Much like tyres on your car, there is a certain amount of loss over time., unlike a tyre where you can just pop on a gauge and top up the AC system isn’t as simple and the only way to really know is to recover and measure and recharge with the specified amount..
Thermal Gun, what a great tool to inspect the system, the obvious is check the temp at the vents, however its awesome to look at the expected temperature drop across the condenser (checking for blockages, internal or external) and pipe temps etc