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I put a can of 134a in the system and it'll blow cold for a week or two. So I put uv dye in the system and the only place it shows under a uv light is on the bottom of the hose going from the bottom of the condenser to the compressor. I've attached some crappy cell phone pics. The dye only show on the mid section of the hose. It doesn't appear to have run down from a crimp or dripped from anywhere. The hose itself has no holes or tears and the dye only appears on the bottom of the hose and not on the top. I'm stumped. Any ideas?
Are you sure that hose does not have tiny tiny pin hole leak(s) in it....in that area of the hose?
I had a similar weird issue....my dye was being sprayed from the metal line that runs right under the sway bar. Worn end link bushings on my sway bar allowed the sway bar to slowly over time to drop down and barely touch that metal AC line. It slowly over time ground into the metal until of course a tiny escape hole was rubbed through the metal. It squirt the refrigerant in a tiny little stream about 1 foot over to a different spot. It drove my AC guy nuts.......All it took was another set of eyes to come over to take a look around and this guy saw the sway bar sitting only about 1/8" from the metal hose.....so he looked at the sway bar in that area and saw it was polished clean and shiny...from constantly rubbing the metal line...then he looked at the metal line and saw the deep groove cut into it.
So....I would put the front end up on ramps. Start it up, AC "ON"....and get under there with a flashlight and look for the leak or spray.....
I would also clean that line completely before doing it and then wrap it with a towel completely to rule it out. If nothing is seen anywhere, and then you unwrap that towel and you see refrigerant on the hose again....that hose has extremely tiny pin holes in it.
Or just wrap that hose with a rag or towel, duct tape it on there real good. Drive it for a day or two....see if the rag/towel has refrigerant on it. If not....unwrap it and see if its on the inside.
Rubber hoses can get these little microscopic holes, almost like the pores in your skin, pressure pushes refrigerant out of it like the hose is sweating, but not actually a total squirting leak. These hoses sometimes deteriorate from the inside. It takes pressure to slowly push it out.
Thanks for the response. I'll clean everything up and put another can of 134a/UV in there and watch for a pinhole leak. It's almost summertime here in FL so I need to figure this out
10+ year old car, florida heat, rubber ac hose with crimp & found dye on the hose --> replace that hose. if it were me, i'd rockauto all new hoses... once and done.
realize r134... the refrigerant, is a colorless gas when it escapes and is different than the liquid dye that you are seeing. refrigerant can escape slowly with no signs of dye, the dye is only a troubleshooting aid. Those flexible rubber ac hoses can look perfectly fine, not leak dye, but leak r134a.
To confirm my initial findings I put another can of coolant in the system, put the a/c on full blast, and crawled under the car with a uv light. After a few minutes I started to see the hose leak. I wiped it away a few times and it kept coming back. Below is a bad cell pic of the leak after a couple of mins. So now I'm just going to replace all the hoses and the dryer, add maybe an ounce of oil, and vacuum it down and see what happens.
To confirm my initial findings I put another can of coolant in the system, put the a/c on full blast, and crawled under the car with a uv light. After a few minutes I started to see the hose leak. I wiped it away a few times and it kept coming back. Below is a bad cell pic of the leak after a couple of mins. So now I'm just going to replace all the hoses and the dryer, add maybe an ounce of oil, and vacuum it down and see what happens.
I have a good set of hoses in the garage. Prolly sell em for a couple bucks. They are available on rockauto too I just checked.
Yeah, I ordered some on Amazon. After shipping it's less on Amazon than Rockauto. I ordered new a/c lines, new dryer, new orifice tube, couple of cans of 134a, pag 150 oil (I'll add 1oz since I'm replacing the dryer), and I can rent a vacuum pump for free at Autozone. Hopefully this will get my a/c back just in time for summer.
I'll post back the results once I have time to get this done. Thanks for everyone's help!
So I finally found time to replace the ac hoses, accumulator, and orifice tube last night. To change the joined hoses in the back of the compressor I had to actually remove the compressor to gain access but everything seemed to go back together well.
I was only using a rented 1.5cfm vacuum pump, so I let it run for about 1.25 hours and the manifold gauge got down to -27. After I turned the pump off I let it sit overnight and the gauge needle didn't budge. I took this as a good sign and added about 1oz of oil, a little uv dye just in case, and 24oz of 134a. While doing this the car seemed to idle like normal, the air ran ice cold, and I basked in the glory of what I thought was a job well done.
Well I try to drive the car for the first time tonight and it has a weak idle, and when I try to move forward or in reverse in gear the dash voltage gauge dips hard and the car will fight a stall, and will eventually stall out if I try to accelerate. When the car is at an idle the serpentine belt and the ac belt don't seem to be wobbling, they make no noise, everything seems like normal.
A couple of months ago I changed the alternator and like a moron I forgot to fully tighten the alternator bolts and the car did the same thing. Because of that experience I feel like I may have not put the ac belt back on right somehow.
What could be causing this problem? Did I not put the ac belt back on right? What else could be causing this to happen?
Update: I cranked it up and let it idle while I tried to figure out the problem. I tightened the battery connections, made sure the ac compressor was tightened up, and nothing else seemed out of place. After idling for about 10 minutes the problems seem to have gone away. The voltage gauge will dip a little bit for a split second when the compressor kicks on at an idle, but other than that it's running like it should. I can't explain it, but everything seems to be ok at the moment.
05-02-2016, 10:15 PM
a/c leak makes no sense 
When the car is at an idle the serpentine belt and the ac belt don't seem to be wobbling, they make no noise, everything seems like normal.