Well, before you attempt to start fixing things you need to diagnose the problem first. Start by starting the car and turning on the blower and selecting the a/c on, go out under the hood and find the accumulator. It looks like a round silver bottle by the passenger side of the fire wall. It will have two pipes coming out of it and a pressure switch with an electrical connector. Unplug that electrical connection and jumper the two terminals in the connector. Does the compressor click on? If it does then you are simply low on refrigerant and have a leak anywhere from microscopic to blown wide open. If it does not engage then you need to do two things, 1) check and make sure that there is a good ground wire running from the compressor to the block and that the compressor clutch wire is hooked up. 2) if that all checks ok then with the engine running unplug the compressor and jump a wire from the fat red wire at the alternator above it to the compressor wire going into the compressor clutch. If the clutch and ground wire is good it will click on, if it clicks on leave it connected for a couple minutes and see if it starts to get cold. If it gets cold you are almost done, if it does not get cold then you need an evacuate and recharge ontop of the other repairs. Let's say it clicks on and gets cold, this means that you have no current going to the compressor when you turn it on at the panel. Provided the fuse is good and you have current going into the panel then you probably have the usual cracked/burned through solder connection in the controller panel and you need to remove the panel, take it apart, identify the bad solder joint, clean it and reflow the solder. Put it back together and be done.

There are a multitude of things that can go wrong with your a/c what I have outlined above is just a couple of the more popular things that go wrong with them. Leak/out of gas, bad solder joint on the board of the controller, broken ground wire at the compressor. If you are out of gas I recommend a conversion to R-134, the conversion kit is only about $75.00-80.00 for factory Volvo and the cost difference from one gas to the next will just about pay for itself right there on the conversion. Also I recommend putting in some UV tracer dye while repairs are being made in the event of a subsequent leak down the road.


Mark