Fridge freon charge.

[dutchduo1990]

Has anyone put a charge in a 12v-120v fridge. Mine has Freon in it right now but is not cooling enough.

[peteco]

What freon type? R22 I assume.

I had a problem with an RV AC back in the early 90's. A repair person came to the campground, replaced a faulty part and put a tap into the freon line and recharged the unit. It worked great. Maybe that is possible with a fridge.

[dutchduo1990]

No, it is R12

[Bruceper]

You can't get R12 over the counter any more.

You can replace R12 with other refrigerants but it may not work in your unit. A drawback is that you need to have your unit evacuated before doing so, which means taking to a shop. Then replacing the R12 with a replacement refrigerant like R12a or R22 which may not work as the seals and pump in your unit may need to be replaced.

Some shops can still get R12, but they will not sell to a consumer directly. It must be installed by them.

If you can add refrigerant, you could attempt to cheat and simply purchase a Red Tek 12a kit but in order to use it properly you need to know the specifications of the unit and how much R12 it is designed to hold. This might destroy your unit, do so at your own risk.

[fwdanielson]

Refrigerators tend to use hermetically sealed compressors with no service ports and should not be expected to lose any refrigerant over time due to the lack of seals that are at risk of slow leaks. If there is some mechanical failure causing a leak they tend to empty fairly quickly. Even if it is low filling a refrigerator can be a bit of an adventure due to the lack of service ports. In an RV subject to motion and vibration one of the clamp on saddle valves may cause more problems than it solves.

Try a supercool measurement and see what you get. If you Google a bit there are a number of troubleshooting pages that explain how to calculate supercool and various reasons for it to be high or low.