If you are wondering how to recharge a car air conditioner you are not alone. With the millions of cars in the United States it has become a very popular question. If the air conditioner in your car needs to be charged up you basically have three options. The first is to break environmental laws, read self help articles, pollute the environment and pull your hair out. The second is called a top up and is done by a professional, and the third involves the full draining of coolant and then a full re- charge of your car air conditioner at a qualified facility.
The problem with simply doing a charge up for your car air conditioner is that you still haven’t found the leak that caused the coolant to get low in the first place. So while you may have charged your air conditioning system, its going to keep needing to get another fill up as time goes by and this can be bad for the environment and your pocket book.
With the coolant in older systems not being made any more, (environmental regulations) its going to get real expensive soon to charge car air conditioners with the older and harder to get refrigerant. Over time it may be better to simply pay the extra cost of fixing the leaks or break down and get a new cooling system installed.
Even though the environmental protection agency (EPA) doesn’t care which procedure you use, the top off or the full empty and re-charge. They do want you to charge your car air conditioner through professionally certified technicians. The EPA actually doesn’t even care if you fix the leaks before you recharge your cooling system. A strange endorsement that seems a bit tragic for the ozone layer.
Then again you could do whatever you want when it comes to recharging your car air conditioner if you think about the fact that the patent on freon expired around the same time it was deemed that its byproducts had a terrible effect on the ozone layer and a newer compound should be used…something with a new patent perhaps?