My central air conditioner is running, but the room is not getting cool. How and where do I add coolant?My central air conditioner is running, but the room is not getting cool. How and where do I add coolant?
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A lot of people have only one or two rooms that can take an air conditioner in the window. Often times, the air conditioner is also rated at a cooling power that would make you believe that there is no way that it can to cool the whole house/apartment. You can crank it to the max to try to cool as much as possible, but then this makes one room too cold and the others still stay too hot. You can try blasting the cool air down a hallway with a fan on maximum speed, but that only works so well. And, it's noisy, too. Well, I have two 260 sqr ft rated room air conditioners and I am cooling 2000 sqr feet of house to a comfortable 72 degrees in all rooms and it's been 95 outside all day. How to do it?
The trick is setting up your home to take advantage of laminar air flow. Set your air conditioner to say 68 degrees and start it in the middle of the morning before it feels hot outside. Put the AC deflectors pointing downward and towards the door. Put fans in the doorways pointing out of the rooms that have the AC. Point them level to the floor (not up) and put a fan to one side near the end of long hallways. Set the fans on the lowest power setting (not high). If the hallway branches out into a bigger room, put a fan in the room that is blowing across at a right angle to the entry, pointing the air flow parallel to the wall. This will circulate the cool air around the room. Keep the fans on low and pointed parallel to the floor, not up!
What you have created is a re-circulating air flow system, much like the North Atlantic Current that moderates the temperatures of Europe. You can check this by taking a tissue paper and holding it up to the top of the doorway. The air flow should be pushing the tissue away from the room without the AC and toward the room with the AC. This happens because the warmest air will be toward the ceiling and you want that warm air to make its way across the ceilings and back to the room with the AC, so that it can be cooled again. The cooled air from the AC will sink to the floor and the fans will gently push the air out of the room with the AC. It will stay low and travel along the floor in the opposite direction and into the warmer rooms. If you crank your fans up, you will create turbulent flow and that will not cool your house as efficiently as will laminar flow. Monitor the outside temperature and when it gets cooler outside by a few degrees, turn the AC to fan for about 10 minutes to eek out the last of the cooling. Then open the windows for the night to take advantage of the free cooling that nature provides. That's it! Enjoy the summer!
If you charged the unit yourself the only thing I can think of is that you did not charge it properly. Refrigerators are not like AC units - the amount of charge, measured in ounces is very critical. You have to be right on the money lest it not cool properly.
If you have access to gauges and you are using the AC refrigerant normally used for cars, the pressure at ambient room temperature of 78 degrees should be around zero. Let the unit run for about thirty minutes to stabilize pressures and then do the reading. If room temp is higher than 78, then pressure can be a tad higher but no more than oupounds.
If no gauges, then allow unit to stabilize and then observe the temperature and condition of the suction line to the compressor. On a properly functioning unit the line should be cold to the touch and maybe sweating or beading. If it is warm to the touch you are low on refrigerant - add small amounts slowly till pipe cools. If you have frost forming on the pipe going to compressor the unit is overfilled and you have to bleed it slowly till it is cold and wet, not covered with frost.
Insufficient cooling is also caused by a improperly working freezer defrost mechanism whereby ice accumulates in freezer compartment. Here the culprit is either the defrost timer and or defrost heater element.
If the AC is not cold- you don`t add coolant. You must add REFREGERANT (freon gas)
This is added in the A/C lines by a Trained Technician. I would recommend you go to your service repair shop for this service. You may have a slow leak -but either way the shop will further diagnose your car`s A/C system..
Check filter, if you have a 5000BTU unit (small) and it is extremely hot, then it wont work great for a big room. BTU is the rate of what the AC will put out. 5000 BTU is good for a small single room. 10,000 will cool a bigger room and 18,000 btu is meant to cool a home.
You say "COOLANT LEVEL IS ON THE LOW MARK OR BELOW BUT THERE IS NO ROOM FOR ME TO ADD MORE."
That doesn't make sense - if it is low, there must be room to add more.
I would bleed the whole system - you may have an air block. Pay particular attention to the water pump.
2003 should use R134a coolant for the A/C system. But if it is not gettign cool either you have a leak and/or something has broke.
Either way adding more coolant will not help as if it leaks it iwll just leak back out. And if somethign is bad adding more will over charge the system and maybe break other things.
My central air conditioner is running, but the room is not getting cool. How and where do I add coolant?
my central ac is running but is not cooling my home
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