Marine Air Conditioning Refrigerant Charge Checks
You may observe the symptoms. You may not open the system — that needs an ARCtick licence, whatever your skill level.
Marine Air Conditioning Refrigerant Charge Checks: Schedule and Equipment
Refrigerant work in Australia requires an ARCtick licence, and that is not a formality. What an owner can usefully do is gather the evidence that tells a technician whether charge is even the problem — which it often is not.
Marine Air Conditioning Refrigerant Charge Checks: Procedure
If you skip it: Repeated top-ups of a system that is leaking, which is both expensive and illegal to do without a licence.
Record the date, what you found and any parts used in the boat's maintenance log. A repeat change—less water flow, faster fouling, a new smell or a breaker that trips again—is often more useful to a technician than a one-off reading. Check the current manual and official sources before changing the procedure, and stop at the licensed-work boundary described in the disclaimer.