[Richard and Rhonda]

If you poke around the site, you will see an earlier post by me, where I talked about my own experiences with the Dash A/C.

As part of subsequent follow ups, I ended up evacuating my system again to check the expansion valve. As some of you have found out obtaining accurate charge information and lubricant capacity is an ambiguous journey. Gas charge is easy enough to check with your gauges, but how the heck do you know how much lubricant is the right amount. Evans Tempcon and STS Frigette recommend that you charge the system, run the AC for a while, then empty the system, and check the amount of residual lubricant in the compressor. Right. Who is going to do that? Well, because I took the system down again, I did. I am glad I did. Even though I put 8 oz of lubricant in when I first installed the new compressor, I did NOT have the recommended amount left in the compressor when I went through the process above. Sanden recommends that you have about 3to 4 oz residual in the compressor. Until I started reading these recent posts I didn't connect the dots. Hmmmmmmm, my compressor bearings failed, at least two other reports of compressors knocking. My guess is that in general we don't have enough lubricant in our AC systems. A lot of the lubricant is hung up in the long hose runs to the front.

So.......the moral of the story is this. Next time your system leaks down, take the compressor off and check the lubricant level before you gas it up again.

The seond thing to keep an eye on is the belts that drive the compressor. I had to tighten mine twice after new ones were installed. They do stretch a little.