So out of curiosity i went to the shop that had disabled my AC before. They informed me that the previous owner of my Volvo had the AC disabled becuase of a funny noise the clutch was making. Its starting to get warmer so i asked him to enable it again (literally was one plug that needed to be plugged in) and as soon as it was i could hear the ac compressor kicking in and actually cooling the car (barely) one issue is the clutch was kicking in about every 4 seconds. They told me that once they convert the system and recharge it it should not kick in as often. My question is do you think its worth the trouble of converting it and recharging it when the clutch is making a weird sound? Do you think there is enough life left in the clutch and compressor to justify converting it and recharging?

 

Depends how much they plan on nailing you to "convert" your system. All that has to be done is install the appropriate adapter valve for R134a on the low side valve on the accumulator. That's $3. Then, they evacuate the system, leak check by pulling a vacuum and seeing how well the system holds it. Then they recharge with the apprpriate amount of refrigerant and oil. If they are smart, they will introduce some dye into the system so if you lose your R134a it will pinpoint the leak. There is no longer any need to do all the crap some shops say they need to do to "convert" the system. So...at my shop, it would cost you roughly $150 to get the work done...use that as a benchmark. Your compressor is short cycling because it is low on refrigerant. It will deep cycle when the correct amount of refrigerant is introduced.

 

Thats the exact price they quoted me. I figure if I could get one summer of AC out of it, it would be worth it. I am a pizza delivery guy so i am using the car constantly. It only has about 150,000 miles on it. change the oil every 3000 miles although i think i should do it every 2000 miles becuase of the hard use.

Thanks for replying