Hola, folks. 🙂
Happy… Thursday?
Slept in the hospital parking lot after visiting my aunt. Slept decently well.
Visited my aunt again in the morning and also chatted a bit with an uncle and briefly with a cousin. Good to see everyone.
My aunt wanted to take a nap, so I headed up to Salt Lake to visit people. On the way. I stopped off at AutoZone to rent a manifold gauge set to check my ac, as it had not been working as well recently. Unfortunately, they didn’t have a set available for me to rent, and when they checked nearby stores, none of them had a set available for rent. So I did what I tell other people to never do, and that is I bought one of those cans that they sell to top off refrigerant that comes with the low pressure gauge attached to it.
You’re not supposed to add any refrigerant to a system without checking both the low and the high side pressures first. The reason for that is that you don’t get an accurate reading on the system by checking just one side of the system.
Let’s call that last paragraph foreshadowing…
Since the AC had worked just fine fairly recently, I figured that maybe I just had a slow leak, and since I didn’t have a manifold gauge set with me, one of the tools I decided not to bring, of course, I figured I would just go ahead and buy one of those cans and top it off.
Yeah, dumb decision. Follow the rules, Stephen. Don’t guess and gamble.
Anyway, so I grabbed the can, and started topping off the system, but the low side pressure didn’t go up like I expected it to. Even after adding 16 oz, the low side was still lower than it was supposed to be.
But adding all that refrigerant significantly over pressurized the system, causing the AC to blow completely warm and the AC compressor to cycle on and off very quickly.
So now I had an issue where I had a massively overcharged system because I was paying attention only to the low pressure readings because I didn’t have a manifold gauge set to properly do the job.
Ugh.
So I drove up to salt lake with a much worse functioning AC system with the intent to visit my friend robyn, but she is having a crazy day and suggested tomorrow would be better.
So I figured I would bite the bullet and just take my car to a mechanic. I didn’t know a good mechanic that I could trust nearby, so I thought maybe I would take it to the shop of an old friend of mine. One of my junior high school friends had a shop in South salt lake, so I drove over there, but it was closed, as in the business didn’t exist anymore or had moved. Hope everything’s okay with him and his family.
I briefly toyed with the idea of taking it to the shop of a friend of mine’s stepfather, as I’d heard he was an honest and good mechanic, but saying that he doesn’t like me is probably a large understatement, and I couldn’t think of how to have them fix my car without being noticed / recognized, and I didn’t want to cause any issues, so I tossed that idea out fairly quickly.
Since my friend’s mechanic shop was a bust, and since my other friend was having a crazy day, I started driving back down south and ended up getting a hold of one of my brothers and having lunch with him at zupas in herriman. Good little visit. Nice to see family in person and catch up a little bit.
We chatted for probably an hour and a half or so, and then I went to the O’Reilly’s in herriman hoping that they might have a manifold gauge set, but they didn’t. So I went over to the AutoZone in herriman, and they did have a manifold gauge set, and I went and checked my pressures and they were extremely high. The whole system was way overcharged.
At that point, I realized that I needed to find a shop that would evacuate the excess refrigerant out of my system, as I did not have the tools to properly do the job. So I called around, but nobody could get me in on short notice, until one shop recommended that I take it to jiffy lube, and I called jiffy Lube and instead of charging me 200 bucks, or whatever, for the AC service, they said that they would evacuate the refrigerant out of my system for free.
I like free.
Of course, they get to keep the refrigerant, so it’s not completely free, but it was free as far as I’m concerned.
After having the system evacuated down, I went and bought more refrigerant and refilled the system. I had multiple different sources of information about how much the system held, and they all disagreed with each other. One system said about 15 oz, one said 16, the other one said 22. So I put in like 15 oz, and it was still reading low, so I put in 18 oz, and it was still reading low, so I bought another can and put in more, but as I started putting in more I realized that once again the system was overcharged. The low side was reading too low, but the high side was too high. 😬
Ugh.
It was at that point, that I realized there was actually a problem in the AC system itself, and it wasn’t just low on refrigerant. If you have plenty of refrigerant in the system, but the low side is lower than it should be and the high side is higher than it should be, then you almost certainly have a blockage in the system, most likely the expansion valve.
So, after spending $100 or so on refrigerant, the system wasn’t any better, and having overcharged the system as badly as I did, I may well have damaged my AC compressor, or still might. So.. that was interesting. I think the AC doesn’t work as well as it did on the drive out, after all that money and effort put into it. 🙃
But that’s exactly the reminder. All of those top off canisters that they sell, none of them do the job properly. Not a single one of them. You actually need a manifold gauge set to do anything other than guess and hope you guessed right. But it’s just not worth the risk, as today perfectly exemplified. You can do significant damage to an extremely expensive system by guessing in an effort to save time or money.
So, all y’all out there, if you’re going to add refrigerant to your system, make sure you have a manifold gauge set to properly read the pressures so you know what your system actually needs. Make sure you know the exact capacities of the system, both refrigerant as well as lubrication oil, as those are two different things, and a lot of those cans of refrigerant don’t come with lubrication oil that is needed for the system. They’re also specific types of lubrication oil, depending on the vehicle in the system, so you need to make sure you have the correct lubrication oil for the AC system as well.
Yeah.
Not something to play around with without knowing what you’re doing, and I never should have tried to take the shortcut today. Had I done it properly, testing the pressures before I did anything at all, I wouldn’t have wasted $100 and risked a potential four-digit future fix from overcharging the system.
Lessons to share.
After eating lunch with Richard and messing around with my ac, I drove down to Alpine to spend some time in a little park by American fork Canyon, or whatever that Canyon is called covers one end of the timpanogos loop. I’ve got a lot of memories with that Park.
But just as I was getting there, I was texting my other brother to see if he wanted to do dinner, and he did, so we met up at a place in American fork and spent the next probably 5:00 or so hours eating and talking there at the restaurant, and then at the park I just mentioned that’s at the mouth of American fork Canyon.
We had a really good chat, talking about lots of things, mostly what I’m going through in my life but also some things going on in his life. Nice to have people who care and love and support me through this extremely challenging time for me.
It’s been really hard.
Probably was a little odd for people inside the restaurant to see somebody crying as much as I was while I was talking to my brother. 🙃
Well, that was pretty much the night, other than stopping off at Walmart between the restaurant and the park to grab some drinks to nurse while we finished our conversation.
Right now I’m in Provo Canyon up by the diversion dam having chosen to risk being kicked out of the parking lot here. Pretty sure there aren’t any signs that say I can’t park here after such and such a time, so.. we’ll see what happens. It’s nicer to park up the canyon because the weather stays cooler longer, and the breeze down the canyon keeps the car cool even when the Sun starts to come out and heat up the car.
Anyway, here I am, the end of another day. No real good news for my aunt, unfortunately. The doctors are going to pow wow tomorrow to see what they will do next. That will be an important meeting that will likely begin to point toward what to expect for the future.
Good night, folks. I hope you have all had meaningful and enjoyable days.
Love to all.
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 