by Richard Hawkins Happy New Year to everyone. Hope you all had a good holiday season. We will begin the year on something of a light note. I am sometimes…
In the Understanding and Diagnosing A/C class, you’ll go beyond minimum requirements for recovery, evacuating, recharging, and recycling by offering real world examples in diagnosing and repairing A/C electrical, computer / BCMs, climate control and electronic components. Most of today’s vehicles come equipped with electronically controlled A/C systems.
That’s right. Two days later the customer called and said it was cooling terrible. I had him bring it back in and put the gauges on it and checked the vent temperature and it was running about 325 on the high side and about 45 on the low side and the vent temperature was about 55 as I indicated earlier. Of course, it was in the low 90’s that day.
TEXA joins MACS Trade Show! MACS Training Event and Trade Show will take place February 2-4, 2023, at the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center in Nashville, TN. TEXA joined MACS as a member in 2018 and is supporting MACS Training Event as a Silver Co-Sponsor of the Welcoming Reception at the Wildhorse Saloon in downtown Nashville.
Repairify joins the MACS 2023 Training Event and Trade Show as an exhibitor. Chris Chesney of Repairify will also deliver the Keynote address on Thursday, February 2 at 11:30am. Chris will discuss The Future of Automotive Service. The big event will take place February 2-4, 2023, at the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center in Nashville, TN.
When thinking about the topic of A/C diagnostic tools, a recovery, recycle, recharge machine (R/R/R machine) is not one of the first tools that comes to mind. It may not come to mind at all in the world of inexperienced technicians.
Motor vehicles have become increasingly more complex over the last two decades to meet the ever-tightening emissions regulations and increased fuel economy requirements, as well as passenger comfort and safety.
This added complexity means technicians are flooded with additional data when diagnosing faults on vehicles. Below is a table outlining the difference between a modern vehicle and a vehicle from 20 years ago. This is only a high-level example to illustrate the differences
There was a group of several refrigerants which were blends with a high percentage of R-134a and a smaller percentage of R-142 that seemed to be the most popular.
It could be a challenging year keeping adequate supplies of R-134a on hand and it will be more expensive.
A large percentage of MACS members have refrigerant identifiers and use of them on vehicles that come into their shop for A/C service prior to beginning any service work is standard procedure.
However, there are a lot of non-MACS member shops who do not have identifiers and unfortunately are not aware of the potential issues which can be caused by refrigerant contamination.
As mentioned in last week’s article, the first thing I did with the machine was check the pressure of the refrigerant in the tank. It was extremely high (well over 400 PSI) indicating there was a refrigerant contamination problem.