How We Carry Out a Car Air Conditioning Regas

Hi guys, Briohny here from Accelerate Auto Electrics and Air Conditioning. Today I’m joined by our of our auto electricians, Chris. We’re going to show you how we complete a car air conditioning regas as part of a service on a vehicle. Our air conditioning service does include a regas as standard. We do get a lot of calls of people ringing up and asking for a regas and we just want to make people understand that the air conditioning system in your car is meant to be a completely sealed unit, so it’s technically not meant to leak.

This car has come in because it hasn’t had a service in two years, and we’re just going to take you through the steps of that. A little bit of a disclaimer, maintaining and conducting work on your car air conditioning system requires a lot of experience and knowledge. We always recommend taking your vehicle to a qualified Arctic-approved technician prior to having any air conditioning work done.

There are many checks that we always complete before performing a regas. We’re going to show you through a few of those, but this car has actually already gone through them and passed them all. Firstly, we’re going to start the vehicle and check to make sure there’s actual air blowing out of the vents. Sweet!

We then put a thermometer inside the vents to check what the temperature is. We typically like to see below 10 degrees, ideally about 6 degrees. Quite often you’ll have to leave the car running for a few minutes to get it to go down to its coolest point. So we’re well below 10 in this one, coming down, so great. Now we’re going to check out the front of the car. We’re just going to remove the engine cover to get to the high side of the charge port. Ready and go.

So next we check the AC charge ports, the other one is hidden down there, and all the other components of the air conditioning system with a UV light for any dye. When we carry out an AC service, we put a UV dye in with the gas. That way, if there are any leaks in the future, it’s really easy to find where they are just by running the light over the top of all of them.

Now we are going to attach the gauges to the vehicle at the charge ports to determine if there is gas in the system. The next step is to start the car and listen to see if the compressor clutch is engaging. When the compressor engages, we generally hear a clicking noise. If the compressor doesn’t engage, this usually indicates low gas level. If it does engage, it tells us there is some gas in the system.

Now what we want to see here is the compressor cut in, the low side come down, and the high side come up, just like that. This indicates to us that the system is working okay and we’re ready to go ahead and service it.

Now we’ve got it all connected, we know we’ve got to recover, so now we’ll just turn on the high side and the low side. Turn on the machine, open it out, and just watch this gauge here slowly come around. This process generally takes about 20-25 minutes until it’s fully recovered, then we’ll begin with the evacuation.

Now we’ve recovered all the gas out of the system, we’ll turn the gauges off. Turn the power off. Turn the vac pump on, open the high side first, then let the low side pull into a vacuum. This indicates to us that there’s no blockages in the system. Now we’ve noticed that the low side is starting to pull down, we can open up the low side and begin to fully evacuate.

Now we’re on vac, I’ve put our concoction of dye and oil in here. This is our injector. Turn the low side off, come over to the low side, take this port off, connect up our injector like this. Screw it down like that, have our rag, take it off, put the vac pump back on and continue to evacuate. We’ll usually evacuate for about half an hour to 45 minutes, depending. That just removes all the moisture from the system and any air left. The reason we evacuate the systems is to remove any air and moisture. Any water that’s in the system and any moisture will become a vapour in a vacuum, and then we’ll subsequently suck that out.

Right, we’re all done with evacuating, now we’re ready for gas. Turn the taps off, turn the vac pump on, turn on our scales, zero our scales, turn that on, and open the high side, always in the high side. We fill that up until we’ve got enough pressure to get the compressor to cut in and we can finish gassing it.

Now that we’ve started the vehicle, we can finish gassing through the low side. We’ll try and introduce the gas very slowly as to not cause any compressor damage. Now we want to turn it off at our bottle and bleed the line through to make sure that we have that exact weighting. Now the low side has pulled down to an acceptable level, we can check out inside the car.

Now we’ve started the vehicle, we’ve got the fan speed on half, two, checking our centre vent temperature, and we’re coming down quite nicely. A few little extra things just to make that we’re definitely running correctly. Feel that low side port, consumption side, it should be freezing cold to the touch. We check our sight glass, down here.

Now that we’re full of gas, checking that our low side is coming down again, checking that our high side is not coming up too high. When it does, the condensing fan is definitely cutting in.

As you can see, we just carried out an AC service on a fully functioning, perfectly operating system. This is a very small portion of vehicles that come into our workshop for air conditioning. Generally, we’d have to do a lot of diagnostic work beforehand to see why the gas has leaked out and repair what needs to be fixed.

For any more tips and tricks on your car and the air conditioning system, follow our YouTube channel or check out our blog, ama.net.au\blog.