Tractor AC

"no evidence on fittings or hoses" leaves condenser, evaporator and compressor.

Leak detector dye is not only for fittings or hoses, it is for everything. And assuming you haven't found any coloring after carefully examining ALL accesible spots (including compressor shaft seal and condenser) it must be the evaporator., but you must get it out to see the dye leak. Good luck. S.M.

On first go-around, look for any places where oil might have exuded. In addition to injected dyes (typically red), which you have already tried, there are fluorescent dyes that are somewhat more sensitive, requiring an ultraviolet light to be seen. Everyone has given good advice so far, but these leaks can be hard to detect, and may require more trying. Good luck on chasing this down.

You may need a leak detector, they range in price. The cheaper ones can be purchase at China outlet Harbor freight. This will help track down the leak.

http://t.harborfreight.com/electronic-freon-and-halogen-leak-detector-92514.html

It actually sounds like a damaged line during assembly. Which happens.

Depending on the age and type of refrigerant being used one often overlooked leakage point is in the rubber hoses themselves. Years ago I had a car that would loose it AC over a period of a few weeks and as with you I tried everything to find it and didn't come up with any single point of leakage.

Turned out the hoses themselves were the problem and they were letting the refrigerant out without letting enough of the dye through to show up as a noticeable leak source.

A guy I knew said that the hoses were likely seeping so try changing them out and see what happens.

New hoses and life was good!

Other than that if your compressor you put in two seasons ago was a rebuilt unit there is a good chance you got one with a bad shaft seal assy and that's letting your charge out around the shaft when its running.

Its a well known problem associated with remanufactured compressors that got rebuilt with cheap parts and seals that are not actually compatible with all of the refrigerants and oils the compressors may get used with when put back into service.

did you use the red dye? should have used the glow stuff!

I don't recall its exact color but yes it was not the fluorescent type. I didn't know much about AC systems back then as I do now nor did I have much for dedicated AC tooling or equipment to work with.

It's amazing how a guys knowledge base and tooling improves over 15 - 20 years to avoid the service industry crooks.

did you just call me a crook???

Depends. How many pounds of freon did you bill your customers for out of a 30 pound cylinder. If it was more than 30 then yes you're a HVAC crook.

Around here at the HVAC contractor supply places I have heard that you're not a real HVAC tech until you're billing out at least 60 to 100 pounds from your average 30 pound cylinder.

usually I bill a 2 hour min even if I'm there 10 minutes. when you add up all the phone time windshield time etc it's about right. a 30 lbs can of juice varies from around 40-100 bucks I always guess how much I use and usually charge 5-10 bucks a pound....and usually use around 2 pounds if I'm just topping off a charge. if I repair a leak and do a complete recharge I use the nameplate weight....if its got a plate that can be read. in residential applications its almost always well under 10 lbs.

if you drove from south Orange county to LA a couple of times I think your tune would change

Fortunately I am from North Dakota and we have a different set of morals and ethics relating to business practice and how we treat our fellow man. For us not liking the trip or 'because everyone else is does it' does not justify ripping off the customer.

you'd go broke here, its expensive to live here. it costs what it costs, I don't carry a gun

A cash register works better, anyway. A POS credit card reader even better. (The acronym ambiguity is intentional.)

the readers you plug into a cell phone are super convenient but the fees are a rip

If being a honest person and treating my customers like I want to be treated makes me broke then obviously I am living in the wrong area and doing the wrong kind of work for me.

But then that's largely what separates us North Dakota farming people from the typical Californians. We might never be rich but we do get to sleep with a clean conscious at night and look our customers in the eye with the same conscious in the day.

Unless of course we're one of the local HVAC techs. Then we have $10K mattresses to sleep help us sleep and $500 mirrored RayBan sunglasses so no one can see we don't look anyone in the eye in the day time.

although many of my customers are people who I occasionally socialize with for the most part our relationship is on a corporate level, they aren't my "friends." I get paid well because I respond quickly and minimize their downtime. most medium to large businesses have an IT and in some cases a corporate computer or data center. these rooms are the nerve center of their entire show. if they go down their business slows to a crawl. when they get a high temp alarm or water cascading out of the ceiling they want me there 2 hours ago. they don't flinch when I charge them 200 bucks to get there, they just want it fixed. I never rip off any of my customers. I will charge them everytime they call on the amount we've already agreed upon.my bill has nothing to do with what someone personnally thinks of me.

We have Sit and Sleep stores here, so we can get a Stearns and Foster mattress for about $2-3K.

We also don't wear mirrored Ray Bans ... but a nice pair of Persol, Oliver Peoples or Tom Ford sunglasses! Now you're talking. And they should be around $300- 450, not $500.

And a Tesla S 85 is the same $80K here or anywhere else in the US - of course the wealthy buy the 85D or the bad boy P85D, but that one's over $100K and if you're going to spend that much on a car, you can afford an S550 - Geez!!

See, we're just like everyone else.

So move to LA.

Would you have felt better if your employer also gave you a bigger slice of the action?

Double dipping for mobilisation that doesn't happen is a bit cheeky though. I don't do it but I also don't travel for free either.

Charging for gas weight that isn't even decanted comes into the minimum price per topup category. Has to be done. You can't sell your consumables for cost price.

Charging for phone calls or other electronic communication? I do that. They are called teleconsultations. If it can save a mobilisation then the customer wins.

It's the ones who charge and and keep coming back to fix the same fault that bother me.

"Would you have felt better if your employer also gave you a bigger slice of the action?"

I would have been happy with getting paid the same hours I got billed out for or paid the national rate for my type of work which at that time was 20 - 30% of billable for my daily hours or the customer getting billed for the actual time and part of the trip miles they made up.

The thing was, this was around 1999 - 2000, I was being billed out at $76.50 an hour plus $1 a mile and making $8.41 an hour with no over time and a $4 a day meal per diem provided I supplied receipts for buying food more than 50 miles from the base shop/store.

On a really good day that I brought in 16 hours billable and every customer on my route paid the $1 a mile, even though there were ten of them all in one location, meant I could have brought in at least $1224 time and ~$1000 mileage while I got paid $67.28 before taxes and cost the company less than $100 for vehicle expenses and fuel plus my $4 meal.

Towards the end of that job I started unpadding my billable time and whatever else I could get away with to make the service charges the most fair for my customers.

GA mate.

That job doesn't sound ideal at all.

I see and feel where you're coming from now.

BTW, is that former employer still in business? Doesn't sound sustainable.

Don't complain about your refrigerant costs or price gouging. When the - then - Australian Labour Government introduced our famous Carbon tax, refrigerant, which was about $50/kg rose to over $350/kg almost overnight. So your 30 pound bottle was costing around $5000 here.

The industry was not happy.

That's what an MBA is all about.

A little off-topic here, but one practice in the automotive rip . . . I mean repair business is that when you take your car in for A/C work, they will vacuum out whatever freon charge is left in your car, then after the repair they will charge your for the entire amount even though they are recycling what they pulled out. They never give allowances for the free freon you just gave them.

That's when I bought my own vacuum pump and manifold gauges.

the little meter in #7 is the ticket. if you really know how to use it can pinpoint any leak down to less than an ounce a year. I swear by mine its basically a small pump. it draws in a sample of air. it then burns it over a heating element, depending on what you have it set for it will alert when it detects a burning sample. various "freons" burn at different temps so you need the type that selects different types.

Might have been covered in another post.

Have you checked the schrader valves?

Most people discount these items because they are so dependable but sometimes they get loose or have a bit of trash in them.

Just a thought.

actually I ALWAYS suspect them first. a lot of guys miss them when doing a leak test....usually because they have their gauges hooked up onto them..also the terminals of the compressor are usually never checked and they can leak too

I will need some information as to the color of the tractor: Green ones are easy, you just need a lot of cash to solve repairs. Red ones are harder, you need cash and parts. Blue ones are less expensive but the parts are hard to get, they come from Italy. While you await a solution do what your grandad did: open the cab door and let the dust fly.

Can we use waste heat in exhaust gas for heating/airconditioning.

Some of us can. And probably you, too.

If you don't want to become an HVAC technician with a pickup full of specialized gear, go to WalMart or your local big box automotive parts place, or go on the internet and get a bottle of AC Pro LeakStop for about $25 and add to your system per the instructions and then top off the refrigerant charge. If it's a small, slow leak that should fix it for several years.

When hi tek methods fail,go back to the basics.

A leak on an inside turn of a multi-layer coil is very hard to find.

Use nitrogen to pressurize the system,then use a soapy water solution (Mr Bubble works well,kids use it to blow bubbles) to find the leak.

Most leaks will occur at the factory solder joints,so check all of these first.

Then remove the condenser coil (most likely culprit) and lay it flat on a sheet of plastic.

The condenser coil is vulnerable to debri damage due to it's location.

Pressurize it with nitrogen,spray with soapy solution,and watch for bubbles.

By laying the coil down, you can localize the leak instead of following a trail of

bubbles down the fins.

Last resort is remove the evaporator coil and test it likewise.

Good luck!

More than likely the compressor shaft seal needs to be replaced.

The seal is under the compressor clutch assembly and it is extremely hard to identify any leaks at that location.

Because of the distance from the front and sides of the clutch assembly to the seal, a sniffer cannot detect small leaks and it is not possible to see the seal without removing the clutch assembly.

I suggest you change the clutch assembly as well as the seal because the premature seal failure is most likely due to bad surface finish. (rough or undersized)

Be sure to evacuate the AC system before starting the clutch removal, keep the area very clean, follow all directions, use the correct tool(s) to remove and install the clutch assembly, pull the correct vacuum on the system, and replace the compressor oil charge with the correct amount and type of refrigerant oil before recharging the system.

CAUTION! Do not overcharge the system with too much refrigerant as it can be deadly. If you do not have the proper HVAC tools and know how to use them or do not know how to correctly charge the AC system, it is in your best safety interest to pay a competent service technician to perform the needed work.

Good luck and stay safe