Boy I sure miss good old R-12

General Discussion
41

As far as the war of 1812, let’s just ask someone who was there to settle it.

I’ll agree 134a is less efficient but new cars have compensated for it and the air works quite well. On cars converted, there was some loss of cooling. Now R12 was not always great either. We took a trip to KC in July to see my sister in our two year old 86 Buick. It was about 120 degrees and the air was on full blast. I thought something was wrong with it and stopped at a shop to have it checked. Nope, it was working fine, just hot out. I also remember parking my new 74 Olds in Laredo for a coulple hours in July. I think it was 104 degrees. We got in and headed north to Minnesota with the air on full blast and I was half way across Texas before the car cooled down. Yeah, just hot out. Still a lot better than no air.

42

Rick, you 100% certain about that?

43

No he passed over 10 years ago. He was messed up from the war mentally but lived to almost 90.

44

No, I’m not. There are a little of people much smarter than me that have long said the hole in the ozone layer was a farce. I mean it’s magically fixed itself now. Come on.

45

My grandfather and my father talked me out of serving. My dad told me how people treated soldiers returning from Vietnam. He is still bitter about it. It’s not like he had much of a choice.

The war messed up my grandfather’s head. He told me he served so I would not have too.

I still think it may have done me good to serve, but I didn’t and I’m too old and feeble now.

46

Thought provoking as well?..anyone…anyone…bueller…bueller

47

Maybe it’s not 134s fault then. Maybe these systems are undersized these days.

48

I think you hit the nail on the head. Mpgs are much more important now. Smaller units = better mpgs.

49

Screenshot_2017-05-17-23-40-47.jpg1080×1920 97.8 KB

In case anyone thinks I’m kidding

50

CFCs (ChloroFloroCarbons) are supposedly evaporated from the ocean and volcanic activity in much greater quantities than all the R-12 ever produced!

Excerpts from a 1999 Australian news article.

The Ozone Hole scare has been a victim of political and corporate interests, media bias and pseudoscience. Again, the media has left many of us in the dark, recycling lies and half-truths while giving rise to unwarranted alarm.

Unfortunately, many environmentalists conveniently omit scientific evidence that does not fit their perceived vision of environmental cataclysm. Firstly, the chance of many CFCs finding their way up to the stratosphere is very remote considering CFCs, depending on which compound is being measured, are four to eight times heavier than air.

The irony of the alleged evils of CFCs is that natural sources of chlorine far outweigh industry’s contribution. Theory asserts that chlorine, not CFCs, destroy ozone. Evaporating oceans emit 600 million tons of chlorine into the atmosphere per year. Although precipitation washes out most chlorine, large amounts still reach the stratosphere.

Erupting volcanoes can emit hundreds of millions of tons of chlorine. These eruptions directly inject chlorine into the stratosphere. In fact, nature produces about 8,000 times more chlorine than man does with CFCs.

The replacement refrigerant, R-134a is not nearly as efficient in cooling. It is far more expensive, extremely corrosive, toxic and less energy efficient.

By contrast, CFCs are nontoxic, nonflammable, cheap, simple to produce, and extremely stable and unreactive. Far from saving the Earth, the ban on CFCs is an environmental tragedy when considering the toxicity and energy inefficiency of the alternatives, not to mention the reduced product life of compressors induced by corrosive CFC replacements.

51

Last year our 20 year old central air unit needed a re-charge due to a small leak I suppose. But the cost of the old freon (19 or whatever it was) was so high, and the likelihood of needing to do it again due to a leak, made it cost effective to just replace it. I guess it helped the economy. Not mine but others. The whole thing just seemed kind of silly. If it was up to me, I’d never use it until it was over 100 out but I was outvoted. Freeze all winter and then have to freeze in the summer too with the AC on full blast.

52

The ozone hole from cfcs is a lie. Fake news

Rick, the ozone hole isn’t a pressing issue at present because we took action to prevent it from being an issue. Just like acid rain was all the buzz in my childhood. We don’t hear about it, today, because WE TOOK ACTION to prevent it from being as bad as it could have been (at great expense, I might add.)

Your attitude is akin to somebody yelling “duck!,” you duck, and a bullet whizzes by where your head was…to which you say “That missed me by a good two feet. I dunno what the fuss is all about!”

3 Likes
53

The first car I had with A/C was a 1992 Ford T-Bird SC, it used R12, it’s A/C performance was middling at best. It wasn’t just that particular car either, every T-bird or Cougar of that vintage that I’ve every driven or ridden in has A/C that worked just good enough so that you didn’t complain about it too much.

My 1995 Bronco (R134a) had exceptional A/C

My 2003 Mustang GT (R134a) also had exceptional A/C

My current 2016 Mustang GT (R134a) does take longer to cool down on 95F+ days than the others did, but once it gets going (about 4 or 5 minutes) it’s get’s quite cold. This car has a more powerful blower fan than any other car I’ve owned.

Overall, the most effective A/C of any car I’ve ever been in has to be the 1995.5-1998 Ford Windstar with front and rear A/C. My friends and I would borrow my mom’s 1995.5 Windstar (this back in high school) sometimes for a night on the town, and even the non-car people marveled at how great the A/C was.

54

My dad and both grandparents bought new GM cars in 1970. All had AC with R12 pumped by the huge, power sucking A6 compressor. All 3 could make it snow inside the cars. None got more than 11 mpg on the highway for many reasons, not just AC.

Jump ahead 23 years, my 1992 Saturn, 1993 SHO Taurus both with R134, both cooled quite acceptably even given R134’s loss in efficiency of roughly 12%. Not as good as the 1970’s cars but I don’t need snow INside my cars. One got 38 mpg, the other 26 mpg on the highway. Far more efficient cars overall.

Always thought the ozone scare was bogus… How does a heavier-than-air molecule get to the ozone layer? No explanations for that little inconvenience much like today’s issues with the polar ice caps. The Arctic is shrinking while the Antarctic is growing. Seems a net-net to me and I live 10 ft above sea level. I am not worried.

55

Nor the Stars and Stripes on any Canadian or British soil.

56

@sgtrock21 - that article contains so many whopper errors. The CFCs have been measured increasing in the stratosphere. It wasn’t a fear, it was a reality. So the “four to eight times heavier” argument is false. And of course there’s more chlorine in the oceans as salt. The thing is, that chlorine, if it somehow gets airborne as pure chorine (don’t know how that would happen, but let’s assume it does) would then react immediately with anything around it and not make it up into the stratosphere.

Here’s how much of each chemical is actually in the stratosphere:

The problem with CFCs is how UNreactive they are. They diffuse into the stratosphere unaffected. Only then are they split by UV light, freeing the chorine atoms to react with the ozone.

Any claim that this was ‘fake news’ is nonsense. Whether everything happened precisely as anticipated, I can’t say. But the threat was real, the facts are real.

4 Likes
57

This is where applying critical thinking could help. Allow me to offer an alternative to your conclusions:

You have a friend with one car that happens to have a great air conditioner and which runs R12. You, on the other hand, didn’t do a very good job car shopping because your car sucks, and one piece of evidence toward that is that the air conditioner doesn’t work right.

It’s not the refrigerant, it’s the system.

This is an example of failure to think critically. The hole was reported. Humans did something about it (getting rid of R12, and aerosols, and sources of CFCs). The hole then shrunk, but you think this was magic. Do you see where your conclusions might just be off base?

3 Likes
58

Anybody besides me remember when sulphur dioxide was used as a refrigerant. When I was a kid, our neighbor’s refrigerator used sulphur dioxide. A refrigerant line opened up and they had to immediately evacuate the house. Also, amonia compounds were used as refrigerants. Our town had a locker plant where people stored frozen food before the days of home freezers. The facility was destroyed by fire and the amonia compounds created a nasty situation for the fire department. Freon was a.great invention. Unfortunately, we mIsused it. We had portable boat horns that were powered by Freon. People took these Freon powered portable horns to sports events for noise makers.

59

Price varies based on outside temperature. A couple years ago when it was hitting 110*+ it was $40 per can.

60

I have used R290 with great success.