Not if you just drive at night. You can drive all winter as well. Just park the car in the summer like we do here in the winter. That still gives you a good 9 months to drive your car. We get about 6-7 months.
X2 on the air in the system. I never heard anything about an evacuation or atleast a vacuum to remove all air/ moisture from the system. Note if you don't remove ait it will give the same problem you have now if you don't get the system vacuumed when putting new parts on air is in the system. Try a vacuum or atleast purge the system of the air.... press on a valve till it feels cold with the compressor running max cool. See if that helps:TU:
Cason, I ran the problem by the guys on the AC forum and the culprit seems to be your POA valve. The POA is stuck allowing the evaporator pressure to go up. The equalizer tube is using the elevated pressure to close down the TXV, causing the high pressure on the high side of the system. (I forgot all about the function of that darn equalizer tube). The suction hose itself is likely near a vacuum. At the low side service port you are reading the actual evaporator pressure. Tom
Not really. The majority of the pressure diifferential is occurring across the TXV and the pressures are too high for actual cooling. You're only dropping ~50psi across the POA valve and the actual amount of refrigerant is small. The result of this is the cool sweating suction line. If the TXV were to open up and allow more flow the suction line would likely get much colder. Right now it's keeping most of the refrigerant bottled in the High Side. I'm convinced your POA valve is stuck partially open. Here's the thread on the AC Forum: http://www.autoacforum.com/messageview.cfm?catid=2&threadid=22150 Between bohica2xo and 1stbscout, they pretty much confirmed it. I've never had to adjust the TXV on one of these systems, but I'll be adding that little trick to my own arsenal. I'll bet if you disconnected the equalizer tube at the POA the TXV would open more, the high side pressure would drop, the evap pressure would go up and the suction line would freeze. I've never done that or even considered it, but there IS a schrader valve in the equalizer tube fitting on the POA. I'm not saying that you should try it, but if I had the car here I would be tempted to give it a try and see what the pressures do.