How to Use an AC Recharge Canister Correctly

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Hi, I'm Mike from 1A Auto. I hope this how-to video helps you out, and next time you need parts for your vehicle, think of 1AAuto.com. Thanks.

In this video we take this 2000 Chevy Cavalier. It has A/C, but it's not blowing cold and we put a A/C recharge that you can buy over the counter at an auto parts store and even though we don't sell these at 1A Auto, we know that a lot of people have cars that are older and they may want to try and see if they can get the A/C to work again. Don and I try one out, try to recharge this car and you just follow along. I'll do a little bit of narrating as we go. Again, like I said, 1A Auto, we don't sell the recharge kits, but we just wanted to help you out. Next time you do need something for your car that we sell, just think of 1A Auto.

One other note: just because of age, some of these systems, they just need to recharge to blow cold again, but if you do have a leak in your system, this recharge will probably go in and if it stops working after a day or a couple of days or whatever, that means you have a leak somewhere and you really do need to get that serviced before you use the recharge again.

I didn't get a good shot. The A/C compressor is down below the alternator, but it's way down there. What I'm trying to show you is that we turned the A/C on, but the A/C compressor does not spin. The clutch or the pulley around the outside is spinning, but the center of it is not spinning, which is what you want when the A/C is going. What you can see here though is that the A/C is on. Obviously I can't show you what temperature it's blowing at, but it is blowing warm. The A/C is on, but the compressor is not working.

What we're going to do now is Don's going to take off the blue cap and these recharge kits only fit on one cap. There are two caps. There's the high side and a low side. This goes onto, I believe it's the high side, but again, these recharge kits only fit one side. You can see he puts the quick connect on there and after he does that, the gauge doesn't even give a reading of any kind of pressure. That's the first indication that there's something wrong.

What we're going to do now is Don just removed the safety tag. He's going to turn the valve all the way clockwise to break the seal on the can. Then he's going to turn it counter clockwise. As he does, you'll see the gauge start to move. Eventually you'll actually hear us exclaim as the compressor starts to work.

There we go. We taping? Yup. Now the A/C compressor just went on. Yup. You can see the outside of it is spinning.Now we're going to charge it up again with the A/C compressor on. So basically what we're doing here . basically when the A/C compressor comes on the engine kind of hesitates a little bit because it takes some power for the engine to run it, so you'll notice that. What we're doing is basically the instructions on the bottle say to keep shaking the bottle until it charges up. Really this car could probably use another few pounds of the refrigerant. You basically get it charged up to basically the low side. I'm going to just keep shaking it until all the refrigerant is out.

Get it around 85? Get it right to that arrow, yeah. We're at 80, right in the middle. How do you point the arrow? It's for the ambient temperature,. Is it 80 or 85? I think it's more like 80. Good? Yeah? It's got a close up of the arrow being on there. I don't know if that's . It's just going to help. It's blowing nice and cold now. Nice.

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