My AC Is Not As Cold As It Use To Be!

This 2005 F250 had its AC compressor go bad four times in two years before he brought it to me.  What we found when we got into this AC system was an extremely clogged evaporator.

Basically, in the AC system, the Freon gets recycled through a series of parts.  The compressor, running off of a belt in your engine, draws the Freon out of the evaporator and compresses it before it is sent to the condenser.  In the condenser, air passes through as you drive and completely turns the Freon from a gas to a liquid.  The liquid leaves the condenser and goes through the orifice tube which constricts the liquid through a small hole changing it from a liquid to a gas.  As the gas leaves the orifice tube it is very cold.  The cold gas then is pushed through the evaporator where a fan blows over the cooled gas which cools the cab.  The Freon gas gradually condenses back into a liquid and the cycle continues.

The evaporator on this truck accumulated so much dust and condensation it turned to mud and clogged it up.  Because of this, there wasn’t adequate heat transfer.  As a result, it ran very high high-side pressure which shortened the life of the compressor.  On this truck, we replaced everything with Ford parts, the condenser, all the hoses and the compressor.  I can’t over stress how important it is to use Ford only parts.  Parts from auto stores just do not hold up very long.

Check out this truck owner’s temporary custom solution to compensate for his bad AC system.  Ryan used an inverter from his battery to plug in a fan strapped to an ice chest.  The air blew into a hole, over the ice and then cool air was forced out of the ice chest through a drain spout on the top of the ice chest and then into the truck. ~Bill Hewitt