Quote:
Originally Posted by snik
So what do you make of my issue.
Cools well at start up. But usually after some time driving. It stops cooling.
If I park and come back maybe 20, 30 minutes later. It works fine. But eventually cuts out again.
2 weeks ago I had it purged and recharged.
Worked flawlessly for a week, but it's basically back to its old self.
The guy didn't test anything when he recharged it. Said nothing looked out of the ordinary.
I'm thinking I'm leaking freon. What do you think?
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First off, I only know enough about refrigeration to be dangerous...
But, I see "heat pumps" (as we call domestic A/C-Heating systems here in NZ) do this all the time. When pushed hard, either heating or cooling, they freeze up the indoor or outdoor heat exchanger (depending on the phase of operation). Then they will basically do nothing until they thaw, either through ambient thawing or via operational phase inversion.
But of course, cars are a little different. My own X5 has sometimes exhibited this behaviour on long summer trips when the A/C is running for long periods. It's cooling great for an hour or two, then suddenly it stops cooling so well. But 10-15 minutes later it's icy cold again. I can alleviate this somewhat by setting the temperature a little warmer so the system isn't working so hard and it seems to occur less often. I can only imagine that the expansion valve or something is freezing up and then the system has to wait until it thaws (as it cannot reverse the operational phase as a heat pump can).
But of course, while my home town isn't actually in Antarctica, we can see it from here, and I don't use the A/C very much at all - not like folk in the US mid-west or Texas etc. So I haven't worried about this too much...
