Car Air Conditioner Trouble Shooting - Tips for Grand Rapids, MI Drivers
Is your car cool? Here are some reasons your AC isn't working!
It's a sticky situation (literally!) when you hop into your car on a hot, humid Grand Rapids day and turn on the AC, only to have it blow more hot, humid air on you. That is, if it even works at all! So why might your ac break? Let's take a look at how it works in the first place.
Let's keep in mind a few basics of how physics work. It will help the rest of this make sense. If at any time you feel this is too much, don't worry, you can always request an appointment to have us take a look.
- Heat will always flow to colder areas.
- Heat spreads out to less-warm areas until everything is the same temperature.
- Cold does not make warm things cooler—the heat moving from a warmer object to warm up the cooler object just makes it seem that way.
- Pressurizing a gas makes it turn to liquid faster.
- Depressurizing a liquid makes it turn to a gas faster.
- Material with more surface area will change temperature faster than material with very little surface area.
- Making parts of a material flatten out (like a condenser's fins) gives it more surface area.
- Vapor will condense around something colder than the surrounding air, like with a cold can of soda.
- Liquid will evaporate when it reaches a certain temperature, which causes whatever it is evaporating off of to cool off (like when you get out of the shower and you feel cold as all the water evaporates off of your skin).
So now let's set up our air conditioning unit. First, we have your coolant. Freon used to be the go-to coolant, but because of environmental concerns, it has been phased out and replaced with R-134a.
The coolant starts in a compressor. The compressor puts pressure on the coolant vapor, making it really hot, and it also pushes the coolant through the rest of the system.
Next, we have the condenser. The heat from the high pressure vapor moves into the air, trying to reach an equilibrium, which turns the vapor into a (still pretty hot, high pressure) liquid.
The coolant moves to the drier. It's a storage tank for the liquid coolant, and it also takes out any water that might have gotten into the system.
Water can freeze and block the rest of the system from working.
We know this is interesting, but you can also just Request an appointment now to get that AC working!
The compressor keeps pushing liquid into the drier until some gets pushed up into the expansion valve. The cooled off coolant is pushed through the expansion valve, which causes it to lose pressure and turn into a gas.
Because the coolant is a lower temperature than the surrounding air, the moisture from the air condenses onto the evaporator and drips into a drain tube to the outside of your car.
As the cold gaseous coolant moves through the evaporator, heat moves from the air to warm up the coolant,trying to create that equilibrium, which makes the coolant warmer and the air cooler. The cool, dry (because of the evaporator) air is pushed into your car by a little fan behind the evaporator, and the warmed up coolant gas moves on to your compressor.
Is this a lot of info or what? Request an appointment now to get that AC working!
The compressor takes the warm coolant gas and puts it under pressure, which turns it into a liquid. The hot liquid is pushed into your condenser, which spreads out the surface area of the coolant, causing it to cool down quickly. The cooled liquid continues on to the expansion valve, which cools it and turns it to a gas again, and the cycle repeats.
So what can break? Well, it's a fairly simple system, so there are 2 main problems that might occur.
First, you could have a coolant problem. This could be a coolant leak, where you have a hole in one of the pipes or parts, or your coolant might need replacing, since it loses its effectiveness every 50,000 miles or so.
If that's not the problem, then one of the parts of the system broke. If the expansion valve or the compressor isn't working, then the coolant won't be the right pressure and temperature to change from a liquid to a gas, and thus heat up or cool off appropriately. If your condenser or evaporator is broken, you'll have a problem with the heat transfer between the coolant an the air.
If your drier is broken, you could have water in your coolant or your coolant might not be stored properly while your AC is off.
And if the fan by the evaporator isn't working, then the cold air won't be pushed into your car.
Air conditioning units vary slightly from car to car — especially with older cars that might have phased out parts. If you're having a problem with your car's air conditioning unit, be sure to take it in to Leo & Ed's auto repair shop.
We'll take a look and make sure that you won't have to drive around in a hot, sticky car all summer!
Request an appointment now to get that AC working!
