A/C problems.

Well this week at lawsons Jerry niece Stephanie went into an auto repair shop with a common complaint of the car ac not blowing cold air. They took their Chevy cavalier into a franchise type shop and asked for an estimate to repair the air conditioning.
The facility provided a whopper of an estimate for replacing almost every component in the ac system. The shop wanted to replace the ac compressor and almost all of the parts that attached to the compressor. Stephanie got us involved before any repairs were approved.
After making some notes on what the Stephanie was told we called the auto repair shop. The service adviser notified me that the ac compressor had internal damage and spread metal through the system. This was believable and we've had to fix this before have seen this happen before.
But Jerremy decided to ask a few questions before he recommended that stephanie approve the auto repairs. He asked the service adviser what the pressure readings were on the high and low side. The adviser stated he would find out and call me back. Two hours latter he called back and notified us that the system was empty and the freon had leaked out. The red flag went up. When an a/c system is empty the compressor will not come on and testing is not possible. The standard procedure would be to test charge the system and with the compressor running to properly diagnose the failure.
Jerry asked the auto repair shop how they determined the compressor was bad and spread metal through the system without having run the compressor. He said that his technician was familiar with this make and model vehicle and that ac compressor failures are common on this type of vehicle.

At this point Jerry called his niece and recommended to move the vehicle. He informed Stephanie that this shop did no diagnosis and was planning on replacing all the parts and hoping the vehicle would be fixed. she agreed and moved the vehicle to an a/c specialty shop. This is what made me laugh about this whole thing. The ac shop test charged the system and found a leaking evaporator.
This was the one part that the first shop left out of the estimate. The first shop would have replaced all of those good parts and left the one bad part remaining. Why did they leave the evaporator out of the estimate?

The reason is that the evaporator is hard to replace. The first shop was only interested in doing the easier repairs and hoping it would fix the problem. Now  that we've fixed the car which allowed stephanie to avoid replacing $1500.00 of ac components that were not needed.

Now steph. is back on the road with cold A/C, and that's just one less thing we have to worry about. Hopefully here soon we'll be able to figure out why all my lights and electronics in the truck are being backfed, but we'll save that for another day. But mostly because we still have 3 more vehicles to fix first.