Now my air-con is broken too

[Ireland]

I've been hearing all the stories of broken air-con for the last while and thinking, while my own air-con is poor, at least I've still got mine working.

Well not any longer.

It died today.

Now I know the air-con in mine was bad but, obviously, it did work some bit.

Her-indoors and I were coming home around lunch time today and we nearly melted.

And the fact she doesn't like the sound of a de-catted sports exhaust didn't help ..... we had to have the windows up all the way home.

I can normally get everyone elses air-con working in a few minutes but still no joy with my own after a couple of hours tonight.

Guess what tomorrow has in store for me .....

[SimonKD]

I reakon about 750g of R134A might just do the trick.

Regards
Simon.

[Byker28i]

Or 600g for my 97 4.2

Interestingly as it was warm yesterday I checked out my system thoroughly. I took off my numberplate and emptied the bottom of the radiator of leaves, polystrene cups, plastic etc. The air intake just acts as one big rubbish scoop.

[Ireland]

SimonKD said:

I reakon about 750g of R134A might just do the trick.

Regards
Simon.

It's fine for gas, that was the first thing I checked.

It's something electrical with mine.

Once I press the button on the dash I can hear the click in the heater control box but that's as much as happens.

The clutch on the compressor won't engage.

Hopefully I'll get a chance today to see what's wrong with it.

[mikesr]

Its a pain of a job checking the electrical side of things. You need to be in both footwells and in the front wheel arch.

I wrote up my test procedure here

Its not technically challenging, you just have to chase around the various harnesses tracing the voltages.

[Ireland]

It turned out to be the pressure switch connection in the multi-plug at the receiver-drier.

The pressure switch was fine, just bad contacts.

The compressor ran once I sorted this and I got the usual "bad" cold air but at least it was running.

The thing I didn't like was that the compressor got very, very hot after a few minutes running.

I need to investigate this further so the car was parked up and the Skyline (with it's air-con working perfectly) was used for the trip to the beach with the kids.

It's probably either an oil issue or a bearing issue.

And for what it's worth, the colours of the wires on my '97 4.2 at the receiver-drier are "white/pink" and "white/black" for the pressure switch that allows the air-con to switch on.

The other two wires, the "green/pink" and the "black" are the ones off the switch that cycles the condenser fan (the second fan on the radiator).

This cuts in once the pressure rises (condenser heats up) and cuts off again once the pressure dorps to indicate the condenser has cooled down.