rev up your engines, okay it's getting
hot outside and you want to stay cool in your car, today I'm going to show you
things you can do yourself to make sure that your air conditioning is going to work this summer season correctly, so I'll explain all about how an air
conditioning system works first now air conditioning is just a heat pump, it
sucks the hot air out of the cabin of your car, and then it blows that heat
using the a/c condenser in front of your car's radiator, the condenser is hidden
in here in the front and behind it is the radiator and the cooling fans that
cool both the radiator and the air conditioning system, now in modern cars
of course it's all computer control, but it's still the same basic idea, the
refrigerant is compressed by the compressor here, it's cool that a car
thing is always the name means what they actually do, and once the refrigerant
it's compressed, it goes to the lines into the condenser in the front, where
the heat is sucked away by the cooling fans in the radiator system, then a high
pressure refrigerant goes on the skinny little line into the evaporator inside
the car, here's an evaporator, when the high-pressure gets into the evaporator,
it expands and as it does, it sucks in the heat from inside your car where
you're hot, now this big tube here, it's connected to the evaporator inside the
vehicle, and it takes the refrigerant out and sucks it back into the compressor
down here, and the compressor in an endless cycle, then compresses it again, it
goes through the condenser where it gives off a lot of heat, and then goes back
into the evaporator, so it's basically an endless cycle of, compressing refrigerant,
then heat gets sucked out in the front of the car, then that refrigerant goes
inside the dash, where it expands in the evaporator, and it sucks the heat out of
the car, then it compresses that again and goes back to the condenser which
gets rid of the heat, it just keeps sucking heat out of the car, now when made
correctly it's a very reliable system, but there are things that you need to check
before summer gets hot, and it doesn't work anymore and
you get mad, and the first thing is make sure your cooling fans on your radiator
are both work and fine, because if they don't suck all that air through there
the engine can overheat, the pressure can get too high in a compressor system, you need to make sure both fans work, so test them like this, turn the AC on full blast
and let it run a few minutes, you want to make sure that both of those cooling
fans are coming on and off, they won't stay on the whole time, but you want to
make sure they both work and blow good you can see this one's blowing good and
over here this one's blowing good too, now it gets really hot here in Texas in the
summer, and I had many customers over the years say, my AC doesn't seem to be
blowing cold enough and I check and what was happening was, maybe one of the fans
was blowing, but the other one wasn't, so it didn't get enough airflow, you got to
make sure that they're both working fine and blowing a lot of air when it gets
hot outside, now the next thing to check is the cabin air filter, believe it or
not, many modern cars inside the glovebox have a filter for the AC system, you
have to fiddle with the glovebox , it just plastic so it's real easy, out it comes and
inside this little panel you take it off voila there's a filter, and this car is
parked under a tree, so I got one of these reusable ones, you can see there's
a lot of crud coming out of it, you can hose it down and clean out and use it
over many times, and you wouldn't believe how many times I'd have a customer come
to me and say, oh my AC is really working poorly and what happened was this thing
had been in there for three or four years had never been touched, it was full of
crud and hardly any air was getting sucked over the evaporator, so check your
cabin air filter if you have one and if you're like me and park under a tree,
clean it all the time and when you're done the cover just snaps right over and
you snap the glovebox back in, and this is one of the few times I like plastic,
because you can just bend it by your hand and snap it back in place, you know need
a bunch of tools to take the stupid thing apart with now, the next thing to check
as nutty as it sounds, is the car's battery and here's why,
now this Lexus maybe 17 years old, but everything's computer-controlled, even on
the AC system, so if you don't have the
correct voltage coming in from the battery, that whole system can go bananas
and start doing really strange things and not blowing really cold air, you want
to have your battery load tested just to make sure it's still good, takes less
than a minute to hook it up and run the test, in this case it says replace
battery, because it's too weak, and it makes total sense, because my wife said, the AC
doesn't seem to be blowing as cold as it used too, well wasn't getting enough power,
I'll just change the battery now all cars lose a little bit of
refrigerant as time goes on, because they have a compressor that has a shaft and
there's a rubber seal, the rubber seal has to leak a little, so that the oil
inside can lubricate the seal, if the seal ran dry, it would burn out really fast,
so they all leak a little bit, some might only need refrigerant every, ten
years or so, but they all eventually run out, a professional uses gauges to see if
it needs more refrigerant, but here's a good check, if you find that the
passenger side is getting reasonably cool, but you go over to the driver's
side and it's not as cold, that often means you're low on refrigerant, because
in this case, the evaporator is inside here, so this side gets to the evaporator
first, so the coolest air will come out here and then when it gets to the other
side, it won't be quite as cool, so the air blowing over here won't be as cold
as it is on the passenger side, that's often a sign that you need refrigerant
added to your system, now if you have a set of a/c gauges and know how to use them, go
ahead and add your own refrigerant, but please don't go buy one of those little
cans at the store and start adding it on a guess, because modern systems, they can
be off even half an ounce and they're going to have problems if you put too
little or too much, you can destroy a system, so don't just willy-nilly decide
oh I'm going to try to put some refrigerant in, you can do some serious damage that
way, and really if you want to mess around with this stuff yourself, you
can get a set of decent gauges for 50 60 bucks, now the last thing you can check is
the condenser itself, now this is really handy, because on this matrix the
condenser is open, as soon as you open hood there it is, if it gets covered in
bugs, you can clean it off with a little water, hydrate them, and then squirt them
off, and then you're going to have a much more efficient condenser, and since
the condenser is in front of the radiator, it's the first thing in a car to get
bugs and mud and crud and sometimes I've seen plastic bag stuck in them, most cars
aren't open like this when you open hood many of them are hidden behind grilles
and stuff, and you can't see in that well so get a flashlight and look around, if you
see an old garbage bag stuck in there or a bunch of bugs, get it out of the way
because if you lower that air flow, your AC goes whoop, the pressures go too high
and it's not going to work right, so now you know how to get your car's AC ready for
this hot summer weather, so if you never want to miss another one of my new car
repair videos, remember to ring that Bell!
