The car of today is no longer the car of 40 years ago. And that doesn’t just mean the computing power of the graphics cards in the trunk, but also the window area:
Whereas in the Beetle, Golf 1 and R4, the hinged or sliding window was enough to keep you cool, today you need air conditioning. After all, today’s cars have been transformed into rolling glass houses with what feels like 7 square meters of window area, which convert every photon of sunlight into heat within fractions of a second. In today’s vehicles, outside temperatures of more than 10 °C therefore ensure that the compressor engages the pulley and has to pump the air conditioning gas through the pipes.
As you always have the air conditioning set to “Auto”, of course, you only notice the hard work of this system when it is no longer doing its job – and the temperature in the cold frame rises excessively: HEY! What’s wrong with the air conditioning?
In the vast majority of cases, the heat pump simply lacks the lifeblood. In other words, a sufficient quantity of R134a, R1234yf or propane/butane mixture. If the stuff has not escaped through an obvious leak, the next step is to troubleshoot the problem with forming gas or the UV lamp. Forming gas sniffing in particular works quite well, but is time-consuming and expensive.
Before doing any detective work, we therefore recommend the simplest, most stupid test of all: Spit on the filling valves and check for bubbles. Often the tiny sealing rings in the Schrader valves have given up the ghost and let the valuable (and climate-damaging) gas escape. This is annoying, sweaty and expensive in equal measure. However, if the filling valve is slowly bubbling, you have the culprit – and can take action.
