How to Determine if your Audi is Actually Short of Refrigerant

[John Gourley]

IF you have a sight glass.  None of my Audi's have a sight glass

John Gourley

On Wed, Jul 2, 2008 at 8:53 PM, <jlagnese at massed.net> wrote:

> Checking the sight glass for bubbles is one way.
> ---- Original message ----
>
>  Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2008 23:52:44 -0400
>  From: <mboucher70 at hotmail.com>
>  Subject: How to Determine if your Audi is Actually
>  Short of  Refrigerant
>  To: <quattro at audifans.com>
>  >Short of taking a car to an AC shop, what is a
>  good method to determine if
>  >its actually short of refrigerant?
>  >
>  >Having discussed the possibilities for
>  refrigerant top-up and all but
>  >settled on Duracool from the nearest Wal-Mart, I
>  thought I'd do a
>  >thermometer test.
>  >
>  >The test was conducted on a cool day with
>  temperature about 70F. I started
>  >the car, set it to idle fast at about 1600rpm,
>  turned the AC on max, and
>  >mounted an aquarium thermometer in front of the
>  vent. Somewhere around the
>  >2or 3 minutes mark, the vent temperature was
>  below 50F. After that, it
>  >continued a slow climb downwards, eventually
>  bottoming out at 42F, after
>  >about 10minutes.
>  >
>  >One thing that surprised me slightly was the
>  frequency of the compressor
>  >cycling. The compressor appeared to cycle
>  regularly at about 15 seconds.
>  >I'm measuring the compressor cycling by the point
>  at which the idle would
>  >jump from a steady idle of 1600rpm to a steady
>  idle of 2000rpm during the
>  >test.
>  >
>  >I was a bit surprised that the temperature got
>  down as low as 42F. I had
>  >assumed that the system was low on refrigerant
>  based on a very sunny hot day
>  >last summer with 5 people in the car. On that
>  day, despite constant max/AC
>  >and max fan, the car just never got very cool.
>  >
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