Automotive Air Conditioning

I’m happy to report that it felt like the start of a new season yesterday.  Not that it’s warm or anything.  It’s not.  Temps barely touched fifty degrees.   Still, I received my first A/C service request of the year.  Whoo-hoo!

Time to shift gears and start planning for the summer.  Maybe visit my old friends at the Automotive A/C bulletin board.  I’ve been away too long.

I’m in the market for one and was actually interested in buying the UVIEW. Can you please send me the info on what you bought?

I just picked up a new video scope from my local Snap-on Dealer.  Unlike the rigid bore scopes that most technicians are familiar with or the flexible fiber scopes (which are less than stellar in the clarity catagory) this one uses a small CCD video chip in the tip of the lead wich displays to a small video screen. 

I’ll have some pictures and/or video coming soon.  You guys will like this tool.  Stay tuned…

I’ve just joined and I hope to see a lot of friends here….of course, learn a lot ant pitch in whenever  I can

Looking at web site statistics, I noticed traffic to Aircondition.Com dropped off sharply two months ahead of schedule. Still down from earlier years, traffic to the site looked like it was on track to make some gains on the one year chart.

I cobbled together a graph that represents traffic estimates from a third party analytics company just to get a better idea of what was going on. The actual visitor numbers are much higher than what is shown on the chart, but estimates are consistent and are probably more accurate (err… relative) than my own numbers (especially since I can’t sort bots and the like from my logs). This chart shows traffic in a one year span. The red line on the bottom of the chart represents a twelve month gas price trend based on U.S. averages for regular unleaded.

Gas prices compared to web traffic

On the next chart I plotted gas price averages the best that I could. The two charts compared shows a sharp decrease in web traffic just as gas prices hit their peak levels. If you put X and Y together they look like they travel together from November on, but, that’s simply coincidence, as raising gas prices don’t increase web queries for a/c repair. I do however, think the opposite is true. High fuel prices are bad for A/C business.

One Year Gas Price Chart

If fuel prices really caused the traffic decrease, I should easily find more data that supports that theory.

It’s possible that weather, rebate checks, bad luck, or any number of things could have caused this. It’s a good mystery that I’ll enjoy spending more time with.

Here’s a nice DIY portable cooler article I recently ran across.

Yes… I know it’s just ice in a cooler with fans attached! Technically you still have to consider this automotive air conditioning. I would call this a “remote loop system.” The loop that created the ice is definitely at a remote location. And I wonder… could this unit also be foil lined for use with hot stones during winter months?
 
Anyway, it looks fairly easy and cheap to make, which gives me a great little offshoot idea. We always use a big cooler of ice in our demolition derby cars for keeping the trans cooler cool. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a bigger version for the derby car to also keep the driver cool and refreshed.

Portable Cooler

With some minor modifications, this could also be used to stash Canucklehead’s Scavenger Hunt URL.

Here’s a video of what it might look like in use.