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Hey guys, Chris fix here, and today I'm going to show you how to easily make your air conditioning cold again by doing a quick recharge for your AC system. I'll be using one of these do-it-yourself refrigerant kits that you can get at your local store or purchase online. I'll leave a link in the description to where you could get your own. This AC Pro kit has everything you need to do the job. It has the hose and coupler to attach to your air conditioning system, and then it also has the pressure gauge so you can read the pressure in the air conditioning system so you don't overfill it or underfill it. This is one of the easiest jobs you could do on your car and get really rewarding results, especially in this summer heat. We have a 2000 BMW here, but this process will work in any car that uses R134A refrigerant. R134a is a type of refrigerant which is now used instead of the old R12 refrigerant. R134a could be found in vehicles built in the 1990s and newer. To see what your car uses, you could use the owner's manual, or you can find the sticker that's either located on the front frame, right up over here somewhere, or on the top of the hood. You can see right here these two stickers. You go look over here and it says R1 134a. In this car, the AC system is not cold at all, and the owner told me a recharge lasts over a year, which means that there's a really, really small leak, which is usually a bad seal somewhere, and it's not worth it to spend thousands of dollars to find the leak and then replace AC components. So instead, we're going to be using a refrigerant that has a sealer in it. Now, the reason why I chose this AC system kit is because the sealer in this kit isn't the typical sealer. It's not a goo, it's not thick. This sealer is more of a conditioner. It conditions the rubber gaskets, so those rubber gaskets and O-rings swell and clog the most common leaks. So now that you know the basics on the refrigerant and what to use, let me show you how to recharge your AC system.
The first thing you want to do is connect our AC kit to the low pressure service port with this adapter. So we have to find the low pressure service port. A low pressure service port is going to be on one of the air conditioning lines. You can see these two air conditioning lines coming in right here. Now you just want to follow the lines. Actually, right here you can see is one of the service ports. In this case, this is the high pressure service port, which we can't use. Sometimes the high pressure service port has an H on the cap. In this case, we don't have any lettering on the cap, but don't worry if you're not sure which is the high pressure and which is the low pressure. Your adapter here only fits on the low pressure port. You can see here it won't fit on the high pressure port, so you can't mess that up. We put that cap back on, and now we're going to follow our AC lines. You can see them right there. It goes into the cabin, and then actually right up here is the low pressure service port again. Sometimes you have an L on the cap indicating it's the low pressure port. In this case, we don't, but you take the cap off and grab your adapter. All you have to do is pull back on this like that, then push down, and then that's connected. You can see it fits, so it fits on our low pressure port, no problem. I'm just going to disconnect our air conditioning refrigerant kit real quick because we don't need it attached right now. That was just to show you that our adapter fits on the low pressure line. You don't actually have to connect it right away. This is one example of how to find your high and low pressure ports, but let me show you my truck to give you an idea of another vehicle and where to find the high and low pressure ports on that vehicle. This is my truck, so let's check it out. On this vehicle, what you want to do is find the AC compressor, and after you find the air conditioning compressor, you want to follow the AC lines. Actually, I want to look right here. Here's the high pressure AC line, and you can see here's that service port, which is capped. Then it goes into the condenser, and then it comes back around here, and you can see here's that nice thick AC line. This is going to the accumulator, which removes moisture from the refrigerant, and here's the other cap. So this is our low pressure cap, so we could fill my truck from right here.
All right, so now we know how to find our low pressure port. The next step is we have to figure out what temperature it is outside. In this case, we have about 90°F, and what you do is adjust this gauge right here. You can see inside here there are all temperatures at the bottom, and you want to point that arrow in the middle right to about 90°F, which is right about there. So it's going to be between 45 and 55 PSI in that green, and that's where we're going to want to build up our pressure. Now we can go in the car and turn the car on. I have my temperature gauge right here. I'm going to put it in the vent so we know what temperature the air coming out of the vent is. Now I'm going to come down here, and I want to make sure I have the air conditioner on. You can see this is climate control, so I have the temperature all the way down as cold as it could go. If you have knobs, just switch the knobs as cold as they'll go, and then you want to make sure you hit this button right here, which turns the AC on. Then we can watch this. Let the car run for a little while, and you can see it got down to 77.1/2°F with the AC on, and that's just not cold enough. So let's go charge it up. I'm going to show you how to check to make sure the compressor is running. Right down here is the compressor, and we just want to make sure it's on. I could actually see it spinning. You can see the front of that pulley spinning, which means the compressor clutch is on. I'm going to go in the car real quick and shut it off, and you'll see how it stops. Right there you can see it stops and it's off. I'm going to turn it on, and you can see right there it clicked back on. So in this case, our compressor is running, which is a good thing. It means our compressor is working. If yours isn't running, that's not necessarily bad. It could mean that the pressure is really low and you need to boost it with the refrigerant, so don't worry about that yet. Let's move to the next step.
The next step is to get your safety goggles on and your gloves on so that the refrigerant doesn't hit your hands and cause frostbite, and also doesn't get in your eyes and blind you. Now we want to unscrew the top of our bottle to remove the plastic shipping disc, then screw the gauge and trigger back on to pierce the can so we can actually use it. Give the can a good shake to mix up all the refrigerant with its additives so we get it evenly distributed. Now attach the coupler to the low pressure port by pulling back on the collar and pushing the coupler on, then wiggle it around so you know for sure that it's secure. Good. Now's the best part. You can see the black needle at around 40 PSI. We need it to be at about 50 PSI. If your needle's in the red, then don't charge the system because there's something wrong, and odds are the compressor isn't running, and that's why you're not getting the cold air. But if you're in the white, or like in this case, you're in the green, you're good to go. So squeeze the trigger and let's charge this baby up. As you hold the trigger, turn the bottle from side to side in the 12 to 2 position to evenly distribute the contents in the bottle. After about 10 seconds or so, release the trigger and check the pressure to make sure you're not overfilling it. I'm going to repeat this a few times until our pressure is in the middle of the two red lines, at about 50 PSI. At this point, your compressor should be running. If it's not, stop and figure out why. It could be as simple as something like the AC compressor fuse just needs to be replaced. Perfect. This looks good with the pressure being in the middle at about 50 PSI. Now we can remove the coupler. Just pull back on the collar and pull it off the service port. Remember to screw the cap back on the low pressure service port to seal it up good. All right, so now we're back in the car, and check this out: 43°F. That is perfect. The AC system is working great, and that's a job well done.
So there we go. Hopefully this video was helpful. If it was, remember to give it a thumbs up. Also, if you're not subscribed, consider subscribing. Up on the screen are going to be other air conditioning related videos you could click on, or you can find the links to those videos in the description below. Also in the description are going to be the links for any of the tools and products I use in this video.