hmm this is a good thread...

to cool my car down before i start out, i usually open all my doors wide open and the car cools down in about 1 minute, i close all my doors and the temp inside has gone down at least 25-30 degrees....

as for my R12 system...i dont really know if i believe that whole if it sits, it will leak..because my car sat for several years in the same place in the sun, all through every element here in wisconsin...from -30 degrees to 105 degrees for about 2 years i was told. My a/c system works well, i mean it might need a charge, but i dont think that I have ever been in a 17 year old car that has a/c that works as well as mine does. :?

i dunno, maybe it was just that no one ever used the a/c?

as old as my car is, i know it was babied its whole life...so i guess its just one of those things

I have. The key to recharging the system, whether you are a do it yourselfer or a professional is knowing the proper procedures and proper pressures. Too much is as bad or worse than too little.

The FSM'* have all this information. I had mine open while adding a little touch a couple weeks back to ensure I was at the proper pressures.

I forget where the thread is (stickey actually)...but there is one of the FSM owners. Or maybe we can get an FSM owner to pipe up and mention the stuff for you.

Well, it *can* hurt, that'* a misconception that it can't. It'* not a guarantee, so it isn't it *will* hurt, but it can. If your system has slow leaked over time to the point where it is depressurized, such that your lines contain nice warm humid air, and you just charge it to the point where it is pressurized such that the compressor will turn on, it will compress the humidity in the lines into water which will rust out your compressor and give you a more expensive repair than had you had the system properly tested, leaky seals replaced, vacuum pumped to remove humid air, and fully charged.

However, if you have what people in this thread have called "normal" leakage over a long time such that your system is pressurized but has lost some refrigerant, then adding refrigerant would fix it. For example, my 1997 SE AC always worked fine, but just recently wasn't blowing cold. The compressor was still kicking in. My dealership pressure tested it, added leak detector, found no leaks, so added refrigerant, which has improved the cooling of my AC.

So it isn't that it *will* hurt, but it *can* hurt. AC systems aren't rocket science, but I've seen people who don't know what they're doing mess up a totally working system. After I recharged my wife'* father'* pickup once, he went back later and put a pressure guage on the low pressure side and decided I had massively overcharged it, so he released the pressure with the schraeder valve and then proudly told me what he'd done. -Except that he measured it with the car NOT RUNNING, so the low pressure and high pressure sides had equalized, so the low side looked high to him. Sadly for him, that was the last tank of R-12 I was able to legally buy, and I don't think his AC worked ever since. This was a case where being clueless about how AC systems work definitely hurt him.