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Been doing some research since my last post and it turns out it is very practical to recycle R12 (or 134a) yourself. The taking it off the high side method has some pitfalls, but it not necessary becasue refrigerant naturally is attracted to the coolest part of the system. If you can get the can cool enough, the refrigerant will keep condensing it in, providing, in the process, enough vacuum to suck more in. So all you have to do is get a suitable reservoir (a new clean propane grill tank seems to be the favored alternative, and a cleaned old one the next best thing though and old CO2 tank or scuba bottle could also be used), vacuum it so it is completely evacuated, then get it cold enough and hook it up to the system. It will literally suck the refrigerant out to the system. - f you can get it cold (21F) enough you can literally pull a vacuum, and just getting it down to freezing will allow recovering a significant amount. To reuse, just reverse the cycle - hook it up and warm the can. 21F requires dry ice or maybe packing the tank in ice and rocksalt. Another possibility if total evacuation is not required just immersing the can in icewater will do.
This has a lot of possiblitiies for those times when you know there's a leak and want to fix it, but don't want to waste all that expensive gas still in the system. It also makes it possible, if you are hard up for some R12, to scavenge it from old cars at the junkyard.
A nice refinement is to buy a cheap inline filter/dryer and hook it inline to clean the refrigerant. Thise are available quite cheaply from refrigerant suppliers with copper tube on both sides, which makes them easy to work into any system, and can be dryed in an oven and reused.
Im going to be trying this on our 900 next week. The AC still works, but with diminishing effect, and I've spotted an obvious bad-O-ring leak on one of the hose connections.
posted by 69.128.7...
, Sun, 2 Jul 2006 12:56:20
, Sat, 1 Jul 2006 21:02:51
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