Understanding Freon & Puron

When it comes to Freon, “gas and go” may not be the way to go.
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“Maybe it just needs a little Freon.” If I’ve heard that once, I’ve heard it a thousand times. The implication is that we just need to look for a drip, tighten a nut, and drop a ten dollar can of coolant in there. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Twelve Fun Freon Facts…
…That Foment Frustration

If your AC is low on Freon or Puron (refrigerant), it almost certainly has a refrigerant leak.
When refrigerant leaks out, it usually does so almost undetectably as an invisible gas.
Finding and fixing refrigerant leaks is usually time consuming and expensive.
I don’t normally spend much time looking for leaks until the second visit.
A lengthy leak search costing hundreds may produce no results.
If I don’t find a leak, that doesn’t mean there aren’t any leaks.
If I do find a leak, that doesn’t mean I’ve found them all.
We don’t have to search for the leak. We can just fill it up.
We don’t know the rate of leakage unless it’s been filled before.
The rate of leakage can change slowly or quickly without warning.
Some contractors use problematic Freon substitutes without telling you.
Some contractors use problematic sealants without telling you of the problems.
Some contractors claim Freon is illegal. It’s easily obtained for $37/lb. as of 10/12/23.

That’s actually thirteen facts and they’re not so fun. Some of them sound downright rotten, don’t they? You don’t know the half of it. Continue reading and then listen to this audio recording to learn more. (The recording mentions my bothers, but I am a one-man operation again.)

Topping Off?
Not a Matter of Fact

Topping off an air conditioner’s Freon or Puron (refrigerant) is not a part of normal service. If you’re surprised by that, ask yourself this: When was the last time you topped off a refrigerator? A typical refrigerator is an air conditioner of sorts. It’s assembled entirely at a factory and it usually operates indoors, so it’s not likely to develop a refrigerant leak. The final assembly of a typical residential air conditioning system, on the other hand, happens at your home. It then operates twice as long as a refrigerator and it does so outdoors. Consequently, it’s more likely to develop a refrigerant leak and need to be topped off. Topping off, however, is not the real need.

That prompts one to ask: If topping off the refrigerant is not a part of normal service, why do so many homeowners believe it is? Because that’s what contractors want them to believe. Finding and fixing refrigerant leaks can be time consuming and tedious. It’s much easier to fill ‘er up and get on to the next job. Freon and Puron are a gas, hence the “gas and go” phraseology. Freon (R-22 refrigerant) is readily available. However, the production of new Freon has stopped. Puron (R-410A refrigerant) is going to be phased out too. Prices have risen as a result, and so has the real need to find and fix refrigerant leaks.

Three Bad Ways Refrigerant Leaks Are Handled

The Switcheroo
Freon Ain’t Always Freon

The most common way contractors handle refrigerant leaks is to ignore them. So they’ll diagnose low refrigerant without mentioning the refrigerant leak. Or they’ll say that there might be a refrigerant leak when there almost certainly must be a leak. Either way, their solution is to top it off without having a meaningful discussion about the leak.

What’s worse is that some contractors are charging hundreds of dollars per pound for Freon. (More modern systems use Puron, which will be explained below.) Others are using potentially damaging Freon substitutes without your consent. To really understand what’s going on, you need to know a little more about refrigerant. There are actually many refrigerants:

The Freon used in older residential air conditioners is actually R-22 refrigerant. Because Freon can harm the ozone, they stopped making Freon-based air conditioners as of 2015. They stopped making the Freon itself as of 2020. Even so, there’s still plenty of Freon around.
There are ozone-friendly Freon substitutes that can be used in Freon-based ACs, but they have drawbacks. All Freon substitutes require that all of the original refrigerant be removed first. Some of them cause a drop in capacity. Some substitutes like R-407C can slowly kill your compressor if it’s misapplied. It usually is!
Puron-based ACs have been replacing Freon-based ACs for over 20 years. Puron’s technical name is R-410A. Puron is not a Freon substitute. Puron can only be used in ACs that are specifically designed for it. If you have a Puron-based AC, you needn’t worry about the “Freon substitute problem”.

If you have a Freon-based AC, then you need to worry. From what I’ve seen, it seems like an awful lot of awful contractors are adding Freon substitutes to Freon-based systems without telling their customers. Some of those awful contractors are highly rated by well-known review sites. If your system uses Freon, make sure the can says “R-22” on the side like this.

The Surprise Bill
Diagnosis Ain’t Always Diagnosis

Another way contractors handle refrigerant leaks is to first acknowledge that there is one, which is at least better than ignoring it. Then they go on to quote an additional $500 to $1,000 to find the leak. That comes as a surprise because most homeowners assume that a contractor’s diagnostic fee includes a complete diagnosis. When it comes to hard-to-find leaks, or for that matter any time consuming diagnosis, that’s rarely the case. Once you learn the true cost of finding and fixing a refrigerant leak, you may be the one tempted to ignore it.

Blame the surprise bill on deceptively cheap diagnostic fees. Most HVAC contractors make a fairly small profit even though they charge hundreds per hour. In fact, many of them lose money just knocking on your door. So any problem that’s going to take a while to diagnose is likely to result in a secondary diagnostic fee – that is, if they bother to diagnose at all. (They may just tell you to buy a new system.) And that’s when their true hourly rate comes out. Of course they won’t admit to charging hundreds per hour, but a little math reveals the truth.

The Magic Trick
A Ripoff Is Always a Ripoff

I’ve been hearing about this one more lately. Some contractors will diagnose the existence of a refrigerant leak. Then they pull a Carnac by quoting to fix the leak when they don’t even know where it is. A leak repair can take five minutes or five hours. How can they quote a fixed fee for the repair before they know how long the repair will take? By quoting two grand or more every time. The majority of the leak repairs I perform are considerably less. Were I to charge thousands for every leak repair I perform, I wouldn’t need to know where the leak is either!

While those are the three I hear about the most, there are many other ways contractors deal with refrigerant leaks. What binds nearly all of those ways together is how quickly they blow through the preliminary diagnosis. A quick diagnosis is a must for most contractors because their trip charge is a loss leader*. While a minority of refrigerant leaks can be found quickly, many can take an hour or more. In some cases it can take hours and require a second trip. You’re just not going to get that much diagnostic time out of most contractors for a sub-one-hundred dollar trip charge.

*Opens a new tab to my new educational website.

Three Better Steps to Handling a Refrigerant Leak

Confirm It
Not Hard, But…

Confirming that there’s a refrigerant leak can actually interfere with finding the leak, at least it can on the first visit. Let me explain.

Your air conditioner can have an excess of refrigerant, or it can have half of it, and the refrigerant’s static pressure will be the same. Static pressure only drops when the AC has lost most of its refrigerant. Therefore, to confirm that your AC is low on refrigerant, and therefore confirm that it probably has a leak, I usually need to check its running pressure. That is to say, I need to check the pressure of the refrigerant in the air conditioner as it runs.

Checking running pressure is easy. However, by doing so I just ruined my best chance of finding the refrigerant leak. Refrigerant usually leaks slowly and dissipates quickly. The little bit of refrigerant that’s floating near the location of the leak (waiting for my refrigerant detector to detect it) is easily blown away by the air conditioner’s fans. That doesn’t automatically mean I won’t look for and possibly find the leak on the first visit, but it often does.

If our initial phone conversation leaves me certain that your air conditioner is low on refrigerant, then I may go ahead and search for the leak on the first visit before I check running pressure. Whether I look for the leak on the first or second visit, I’ll probably ask you to turn the HVAC system completely off at least 24 hours before the leak check. That way the leaking refrigerant can accumulate in the area of the leak, which might make it easier to find the leak.

Find It
Easy, Hard, or Really Hard

When refrigerant leaks out of an air conditioner, it usually floats away as a colorless and odorless gas. However, a little bit of oil may leak out with it. In that case, I may see the leak’s location by virtue of an oil stain. If I see an oil stain, I’ll put the electronic refrigerant detector (a refrigerant sniffer, so to speak) to that location to confirm the leak. In that case we’ve found the refrigerant leak in just minutes. Or if we don’t find it quickly, and if you’d like, we can just top the system off and see how it goes. Either way, that was easy.

While we sometimes get an oily visual indicator, we often don’t. When we don’t, I can use the refrigerant sniffer to check readily accessible parts of the system that are known for leaking. (As explained above, that may not happen till the second visit.) If I don’t find the leak at those parts, I can check less accessible parts. That might include a cooling coil that’s in a metal box that’s covered in layers of gummy tape and mastic. Have you ever tried removing that stuff? Now it’s getting hard. Or at the very least, it’s getting time consuming.

Some leaks are so tiny that they’re practically impossible to find. Other leaks can be in refrigerant lines that are behind walls or buried underground. While a good sniffer is the go-to tool for finding leaks, finding leaks like these may require alternate methods like adding UV dye to the system or isolating and pressurizing individual components. Some alternate methods take hours and require multiple trips. Now it’s getting really hard. Or at the very least, it’s getting really expensive.

Fix It
Easy, Hard, or Impossible

An easy repair might include tightening a service valve cap or adding sealant to the system. Either one just takes minutes. However, I rarely recommend sealant. In my experience, sealant works about 30% of the time. It seems to do nothing good or bad about 60% of the time. And about 10% of the time it clogs something up and makes things worse. There are even those who say sealant has ruined compressors. So while sealant may be an easy fix when it works, it can get very ugly when it doesn’t.

A hard leak repair is really just a time consuming repair. Such repairs may take hours and may require multiple trips. The most common example is that of a leaking fitting. The usual solution is to cut out the fitting and replace it with a new one. That requires sucking the refrigerant out of that part of the system, making the repair, vacuuming, and recharging. I don’t normally block two to six hours off the schedule for a single job unless I know of that need in advance, hence the multiple trips.

An impossible leak repair is almost never truly impossible. It’s just so impractical that it’s not worth trying. For example, if you get a leak in the middle of a coil then you’re probably going to replace the coil. Coils are built like radiators. The have several layers of tubing that are embedded in aluminum fins. If there’s a leak in the middle of the coil, it may be impossible to get to. If the HVAC system is old enough, coil replacement could be a catalyst for replacing the entire air conditioner.

Bonus Step: Finance It
All Kinds of Hard

You can understand why most contractors don’t want to deal with refrigerant leaks. Finding them can be a cakewalk or a firewalk. Fixing them can take the turn of a wrench or an act of congress. Most of the time reality lies between those extremes. Black and white (flat rate) pricing systems are ill-equipped to deal with the many shades of gray that refrigerant leaks present. Most repairmen are just as ill-equipped. So many of them go with the “switcheroo” and call it good. And when that no longer satisfies, they may just tell you to buy a new system. This is the cold hard truth most contractors want to hide from you.

It’s doesn’t have to be that way. You just have to kick it old school. That is to say, pay by the hour for the diagnosis. It’s an old idea that’s new again. Flat rate pricing is an inherently flawed system that leads to the surprises described above. I avoid those absurdities by telling you the truth upfront: It’ll take as long as it takes and, until I know exactly what’s wrong, you’re paying by the hour. I may find the leak in five minutes. I may find it in ninety-five minutes. I may find it on the first visit. I may find it on the third. Or I may not find it at all. Regardless, I expect to be paid for the effort. Please think long and hard about that before calling.

What I don’t expect is for you to have blind faith. Stay, watch, and ask questions while I work. I’ve got multiple refrigerant detectors, nitrogen, UV dye, and good old liquid soap for finding the leak. And I’ve got silver solder, Nylog, sealant, epoxy, filter/driers, Freon, Puron, and lots of fittings for fixing the leak. Unlike most, I show up ready. Are you ready to repair the leak the old fashioned way? I’m your huckleberry. Or do you want to roll the dice with sealant? Let’s roll. Or do you just want to top it off and fahgettabout the leak? Giddy up. I’ll certainly give my advice, but the final decision is yours. After all, you’re the one laying down the cold hard cash.

This video will show you a simple way to check your refrigerant level.