A/C is out

[KarlS]

Been running without it most of the Spring but it got hot this week, so I tried to turn it on yesterday. The fan blows but no cold air. The fuses are good and the compression is spinning, so I'm taking it in to the dealer tomorrow. They're pretty hopeless but diagnosing an A/C system shouldn't be to hard.

Anyone else have a problem with their A/C yet?

Karl

[P.Viby]

As far as I know. It is a good idea to turn on the A/C once in while so the system is not standing still for month. It is probaly just some new "gas" which is needed.

[percymon]

If not turned on regularly, even for ten minutes a week, the seals dry out and perish - you have probably lost the gas as a result.

I just hope you don't need new seals.

[skl]

Guess I'm lucky but it works fine (used it yesterday driving back from an autocross.) and it sat thru an Iowa winter with the air not turned on (obviously) for several months. Really don't need it when temp is below zero!! For those of us in winter climates, we don't turn it on in any road cars even used every day for several months...

[KarlS]

It turns out the problem had nothing to do with dry seals or loss of coolant or actually anything physical. Believe it or not, it was caused by the TrafficPro I installed last year!

According to the tech, whom I talked to directly, the DME was not sending a signal to the AC compressor to turn on. Why? Because it was looking for a CDR23 in the car and when it didn't find one, it registered a fault with the CAN bus communication. Somehow this fault caused the DME to think it couldn't communicate with the AC compressor either, so it didn't try.

The fix? The tech said he unplugged the yellow C1 connector on the back of the TrafficPro. On the TP, this connector is only used for line out signals for an external amp, but I guess on the CDR23 it must be used to talk to the CAN bus. As soon as the DME was unable to "see" a headunit, it must have assumed there wasn't one and everything else went back to normal. The AC started working again and the TrafficPro still works fine without the C1 connector. I suspect the same thing could be accomplished by using a PST2 to tell the DME there is no radio but the tech did not try that.

Dealer charged me about $220 labor for the fix. Pretty strange, huh?

Karl

[skl]

Aren't computers wonderful? Must have Microsoft software in there somewhere!

[Dale Zelinsky]

These Microsoft jokes are still, after all this time, quite amusing.