Air conditioning is a nice luxury and when it stops working you want to get it fixed quickly. However, some repairs you may find will cost you a lot of money. However, with just a bit of knowledge about the air conditioning system you may be able to figure out what is wrong yourself.
One of the most common problems you will see with an air conditioner that has stopped working is that you are running it with no refrigerant or little. This can happen when you have a little leak in the system. Maybe a seal isn’t completely whole anymore, or there could even be a tiny hole in the condenser, or even the evaporator. Leaky hoses can even lead to the loss of refrigerant, if you can figure out what it is and repair it do that. But in a lot of cases you will need to have someone who knows about these problems fix it. You should check to see if there are any leaks or problems with seals before you have the system recharged though.
Some cars are equipped with a safety switch that will not let you use the air conditioner if you have low refrigerant. It’s a very good check system, because if the compressor ran with too little refrigerant it could easily ruin it.
Make sure that you check to see if the fuse that runs the compressor is blown, this could be another cause of the air conditioning not turning on. The nice thing about this is that a fuse is very simple to replace if you find out that is the problem. Also the clutch that runs the compressor could be bad too, replacing this would be a job for a skilled technician, but you can tell if it’s leaked around this so you don’t go through a bunch of other things to get the car fixed.
Most likely if you have a problem with the compressor it could have been caused by low refrigerant. You also should check the system pressure. Either take the car in or buy some A/C gauges. It’s a fairly easy process; all you do is attach the gauges it will let you know if the refrigerant is low. Don’t add the refrigerant until you have checked out everything for leaks though. It would be a waste of money.
There are several different areas that you should look for leaks and seals that need to be replaced if they are not keeping the refrigerant in. Catching this problem quickly is a must, as stated above you could possibly ruin the compressor if you don’t check when you first notice that the A/C isn’t running as cold as normal.
Checking the system every so often can be a good way to prevent problems in the future. Perhaps when you go to get oil change you should check the A/C system to make sure that there are no leaks and that you have enough refrigerant in it.