In addition, there is a $10,000 “rat-out” fee your neighbor can collect if you’re venting refrigerant and he tattles on you. First, it is a pernicious ozone-destroying agent, so if you are going to use it in a car, you are morally required to do everything under the sun to thoroughly leak-test the system before charging it with R12. Each has its own cult following and requires its own EPA-approved charging fittings. Clarifying note: Freon is a brand name of refrigerant that has come to be used generically to mean any refrigerant. The climate control fan blows air over the evaporator, and any heat in the air is absorbed by the refrigerant. Of course, there could be other problems such as a seized compressor or a blocked expansion valve. Over time, a credible middle ground emerged. Stay on the right side of the law, the environment, and your conscience, and don’t vent refrigerant. Types of Refrigerant Used in AC Nowadays. Initially, an invasive recipe was proposed: the system should be flushed to remove any traces of the old R12-specific mineral oil, the compressor and expansion valve should be replaced with R134a-specific versions to perform correctly, and the old hoses should be replaced with 134a-specific barrier hoses to forestall leakage. The sudden expansion of the gas chills the evaporator coils. We’re most familiar with water, which we see as ice when it’s cold, liquid when it’s at room temperature, and steam when we boil it. … Because of R1234yf’s mild flammability, BMW and Mercedes are now adopting R744. For all of these reasons, the issues of conversion and performance need to be cleanly separated. Pop the hood. The compressor should then be filled with R134a-specific oil (usually PAG oil) and the system evacuated and recharged. R134a refrigerant is common, but many new vehicles are now switching to 1234yf refrigerant. You can then add ester oil that’ll work with either R12 or R134a. State EPA is angry with you And some combination of: * Nothing * Compressor is inefficient * Compressor can’t work at all #1 is certain. If you use anything other than R134a, you’ll likely create a situation where you must be the one servicing the system. The advantage of ester oil is that it works with both R12 as well as R134a, so you can fill the system with it and then use either refrigerant. Over time, these factors break down the hoses and connections, causing the pressurized refrigerant gas to leak out. You can prevent this loss by having your system checked annually prior to the start of hot weather. Keeping Cool: An AC History. Tom King published his first paid story in 1976. You should always attempt to verify the information with your vehicle manual or information provided on the underhood stick, sometimes also located on the top of the accumulator. Reusing Refrigerant: Refrigerant must be properly recycled or reclaimed before it can be reused, even if it is being returned to the vehicle from which it was removed. A gentleman in Canada was very interested until he learned about the R12. As you probably know, matter can exist in three states—solid, liquid, and gas. R134a systems operate at higher discharge-side pressures than R12, which can cause compressor seals to leak. But in order for refrigeration to work, you need something that has a low boiling point, something that exists as a gas at room temperature and can be easily pressurized into a liquid so that, when it is allowed to expand, it immediately boils at room temperature and cools. Automobile manufacturers began to transition to the non-ozone depleting refrigerant, HFC-134a, with 1992 model year vehicles. The concern that the original R12 hoses would leak R134a like a screen door on a submarine appeared to be largely unfounded, as the insides of original hoses seemed to naturally become impregnated with a combination of refrigerant and oil that acted as a barrier. eBay requires that anyone posting an auction for R12 check that the buyer has that certification, but eBay has no way to enforce it. International manufacturing of new R12 ceased in 1996, but existing R12 can still be reclaimed and purified. Any old black o-rings should be replaced with R134a-compliant green o-rings. Your car's air-conditioning system compresses refrigerant gases into a liquid, then releases the gas through a radiator-like evaporator coil. This week, we discuss the thing that’s actually boiling and cooling—the refrigerant itself. The EPA warns about the growing use of an illegal central air refrigerant as the cooling season begins, from the editors of Consumer Reports. You can order a personally inscribed copy here. There are other EPA-approved refrigerants such as “Hot Shot” and “Freeze 12,” which you can find here. It’s often said that buying or selling R12 is illegal. Of course, the receiver/drier needs to be replaced, as it does any time an A/C system is opened. Whether it’s in your car or home, many air conditioners manufactured before 2003 use Freon as the refrigerant that cools the warm air. Tap Freon can and open valve to begin charging. In contrast, the most likely reason you’d consider recharging with an “alternative refrigerant” is because the refrigerant leaked out of your car and you’re trying to avoid doing a full-on A/C rejuvenation which includes finding the leak and properly changing refrigerants. R-404A is primarily used transport refrigeration. For starters, R12 was the one that is on older vehicles. King holds a Bachelor of Arts in communications from Southwestern Adventist College. Sign up for the latest automotive news and videos—in short, everything for people who love cars. The first thing you need to do is find out what type of Freon you’ll need for your air conditioner. Note also that, unlike mineral oil, both PAG oil and ester oil are hygroscopic—that is, they absorb water. Refrigerant gas often has a dye tag that may show up around hoses and connections as a red fluid. The following is verbatim from EPA’s website: “EPA performs random inspections, responds to tips, and pursues potential cases against violators of the Section 608 regulations. It is also an HFC refrigerant. Freon is the brand name of a type of air-conditioning refrigerant gas manufactured by DuPont Chemicals. IcyBreeze Portable Air Conditioner and Cooler. Yes, there’s a certain irony in the fact that we’ve gone full-circle from the invasive “you’ll need to replace almost everything including the compressor and hoses in order to properly convert R12 to R134a” to “you don’t need to replace all that much; just flush it, new oil, new drier and o-rings,” and back to “you’ll need to replace almost everything including the compressor, hoses, and the condenser.” But this change has occurred both because the cars are that much older than they were when the R12 to R134a change occurred in the mid-1990s, and there is now a better understanding of the need to take advantage of updated compressors and condensers in order to get the A/C systems to blow adequately cold with R134a. For example, while R12 itself is similar to the halon used in fire extinguishers, when R12 is mixed with mineral oil—the most commonly-used lubricant oil in R12 systems—and aerosolized and burned, it creates phosgene gas, which was used as a chemical agent in WWI. With a tight modernized system that’ll accept either refrigerant, you should then consider where and how the system will be operated. The manufacture and sale of the small cans of R12 used by hobbyists to “top off” a system also ended, although New Old Stock (NOS) cans of R12 are still privately traded on eBay and Craigslist (I’ll come back to that). – Paula. If the target environment is only moderately hot, and your use of the car is light, R134a will probably be fine. You can recharge your A/C system with chicken soup (lousy refrigerant, by the way) and no black helicopters will come to your house, but in a world where people usually don’t hold onto their cars forever, R134a is still the best choice for retrofit applications. Locate the refrigerant fill port … And with R134a costing only two bucks a can, converting to the new inexpensive refrigerant seemed the thing to do. The refrigerant transfers the heat as it changes from the liquid state to gas state. In the years following the switch to R134a, there was confusion over what was required to maintain the A/C of older cars. The problem is that some inexpensive available refrigerants—ammonia and propane, for example—are poisonous and/or flammable. So when someone says, “You can’t get R12 anymore,” or “It’s illegal to use R12,” those things simply aren’t true. 1. R-410A. You can spend interesting evenings going down the rabbit hole online and reading posts from folks who vigorously defend flammable refrigerants and say, “You do know that your car carries 20 gallons of flammable gasoline, don’t you?” Yes, but gasoline usually isn’t routed through the passenger compartment, and there’s a zero-tolerance policy toward gasoline leakage. Rob Siegel has been writing the column The Hack Mechanic™ for BMW CCA Roundel magazine for 30 years. By the 1995 model year, all new vehicles sold in the United States with air conditioners used HFC-134a refrigerant. Oil doesn’t stay in the compressor, however, it dissolves in the liquid refrigerant and gets carried through the system as a fine particulate mist when the refrigerant goes through its liquid/gaseous transition. Types of Car AC Refrigerants. Locate the Low-Side Service Port. Copyright 2021 Leaf Group Ltd. / Leaf Group Media, Alpine Home Air Products: Keeping Your AC System Properly Maintained, Car AC Systems: Mercedes Benz Air Conditioning Compressor, Wayne's Garage: Good A/C Performance and Maintenance saves Money. So, modern cars use R134a refrigerant which is environmentally friendly. Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), including R12. Actually, a car's air-conditioning system can run for years without recharging if properly maintained. At low levels, the evaporator coils can ice up. I can tell you that R12 is some seriously great refrigerant; it gets both of these cars meat-locker cold almost from the instant the A/C is turned on. Locate the Low Pressure Side Refrigerant Fill Port 1. But many European cars, such as the vintage BMWs I love, had A/C systems that never functioned all that well even when they were new and charged up with R12. Bottom line, R134a simply doesn’t cool as well as R12. If you’re going to go to all that effort on a vintage car with an A/C system that hasn’t been used in years, it usually behooves you do a full-on rejuvenation of the system and replace the compressor with a new compact rotary-style unit, replace the condenser with the largest parallel-flow condenser and big fan that’ll fit in the nose of the car, make all new hoses, and flush the evaporator. Many drivers assume their air-conditioning system consumes coolant oil much as the engine uses fuel. The Environmental Protection Agency outlawed ozone depleting substances in 1994 and, as a result, R-134a Freon is now used instead. One essential element of climate control systems is the refrigerant. If your unit was built prior to 2010, it's likely going to use R-22. There’s a lot of misinformation surrounding R12. Refrigerant gas does not “wear out” like oil nor is it used up like fuel. Ending the storage shell game and searching for car-centric property, Watch the Hyperion hydrogen hypercar hit the road, Chip Foose reimagines the iconic Jaguar E-type – Ep. So as long as the system was functioning correctly and not leaking, it appeared that you could flush the system of any old oil, change the oil in the compressor to PAG or ester oil, replace only the receiver-drier and the o-rings, screw on the charging port adapters, evacuate the system, and recharge it with the new R134a, using about 80% as much as the original R12 volume. But the problem with R12 is twofold. Because of this, in the early 1930s, a new refrigerant based on a chlorofluorocarbon (CFC), specifically dichlorodifluoromethane, was developed. The issue is whether you should. Today, nearly all new vehicles offer air … We earn a commission if you click this link and make … But if you live in a hot climate, want to daily-drive the car, and the car has a tiny-capacity A/C system which, even after modernization, may only perform marginally, you may want to consider sticking with R12. 98. The first one is called R12, while the other one is R134a. And that brings us to…, I continue to use R12 in two of my cars—my 1972 BMW 2002tii and 1973 Bavaria. It was replaced by R-410A in 2010. The molecule size of R134a is smaller than that of R12, so there was concern that R134a could leak out through the hoses and flare fittings that R12 systems used. Through the medium of this article, we shall enlighten you about what is refrigerant, the importance of refrigerant, and also the kind of refrigerant used in AC nowadays. Small NOS cans of R12 are widely available on eBay and Craigslist for about $30 apiece. R12 and R134a are not the only game in town. Two types of refrigerant are used in automotive air conditioners. If you've need to make a major repair to your car air conditioner such as installing a new evaporator, compressor or condenser, then you can easily update to new refrigerant at the same time. The scientists found that the Freon-R12 gas is the most damaging to the ozone layer. However, it was found that when a car emits R-12 Freon, it depletes the ozone layer. Piston Slap: When the Signal Acquisition Module (SAM) surrenders? Refrigerant: Must be EPA-approved and cannot be intentionally released (vented) into the environment. In addition to the low boiling point, there are two other de facto requirements for refrigerant: It shouldn’t be poisonous, and it shouldn’t be flammable. Follow these steps to retrofit air conditioning in cars to new refrigerant, such as R-134a. They may sound just like similar part numbers, but there are major differences between them. Aupoko R134A AC Refrigerant Charge Hose, 1/2’’ Acme Can Opener Tap Dispensing Valve, and Recharge Hose with Pressure Gauge, Fits for Car AC Air Conditioning Refrigerant 4.3 out of 5 stars 298 $12.99$12.99 Get it as soon as Fri, Nov 6 The compressor circulates refrigerant, usually R-134a, through the condenser and evaporator, which are connected via tubes and hoses. R12 systems used mineral oil, but unfortunately mineral oil doesn’t dissolve in R134a. An R134a-specific expansion valve was preferred but not strictly necessary. Refrigerant and oil capacity guides are based on data provided by sources such as AllData and Mitchell. Turn Off Stop/Start. Note that I am not advocating taking the exam and getting the EPA 609 certification simply so you can legally buy R12; I’m just stating what the law appears to be. Both claims are demonstrably untrue. 3. The difference in refrigerants is all down to how old your car is. Other brands of R-22 refrigerant gas are made by other manufacturers. It became known as R12 or Freon. In fact, R12 was used for many years as a propellant in a variety of aerosol products and sprayed directly into the air, and it is closely related to the halon used in fire extinguishers.
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