Love the label.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ancient Mariner
Yeah, HC refrigerants tend to exchange heat better than the HFCs so you get better bang for your buck in the condenser. Where they really shone was the crap R12 to R134a conversions where they'd add a whiff of POE oil on top of the mineral and change out the refrigerant. R134a sucks in an old R12 tube and fin condenser and didn't do much for dragging the mineral oil around. Replace the 134a with Hychill and you get much better results.
Proper conversions (larger modine or parallel flow condensers), a good flush and the right lubricants help and with modern systems that are designed right from the go it's a non-issue. There were a *lot* of quick and dirty retrofits though which resulted in people blaming R134a for being a crap refrigerant, dead compressors from mineral oil logging in the evap and generally unhappy motorists.
I run R134a in my cars that were designed for it. In my 88 Volvo I run the largest aftermarket parallel flow condenser I could buy, new larger Sanden compressor and Hydrocarbons. Nothing like having capacity to spare when stuck in traffic on a 40 degree day in an old Swedish fridge that had a sub-par A/C out of the factory.
One thing that always annoyed me was the Hychill mantra of "you need less". They generally recommended a smaller charge (volumetrically) as HCs condensed so much better that you don't need as much backed up for subcooling. The issue with that was in meeting their marketing "yay it's so much better you need less", they had so little reserve that running on the ragged edge would quickly start to oil log the evap and resulted in dead compressors.
If you charged "like for like" based on a weight/density conversion they worked just as well, but tended not to lunch compressors.
