About the car:
- Year - 2006
- Make - Chrysler
- Model - Pacifica
- SubModel - Touring
- Engine - 3.5 Liter 6 Cylinder
Initial Problem - Vehicle barely has any hot or cold air coming from the vents. Blower motor can be heard turning on, but very little air is felt.
Diagnosis & Recommendation - Upon entering the vehicle and turning on the climate control, we can indeed hear the blower motor engaging. It is noisier that it should be and almost sounds like it's trying to blow a lot of air through a very small hole. We cycled through the vents and did not notice any change in these symptoms. We then removed the passenger lower dash panel to access the cabin air filter, suffice to say... we think we found at least one of the contributing factors to the air not feeling as it should. Initial recommendation is to replace the cabin air filter with a new, quality, 'carbon activated' filter.
What we learned from this - Manufacturer maintenance is an important guideline to use in vehicle maintenance. If the customer had a repair facility that used those metrics and followed them carefully, the customer would likely never have experienced this scenario. While the problem was "just a dirty filter", the adverse effects are never ending.
A dirty cabin filter can lead to:
- Premature wear of the blower motor
- Overheating of the blower motor resistor
- Poor air quality in the vehicle
Outcome - Once we replaced the cabin filter and vacuumed out the plenum chamber the system now had air flowly much more freely. Although in this scenario the air was not "cold" when the A/C was on, it resolved the initial request. To fix the A/C system we performed a full evacuation and vacuum test of the A/C system, changed the A/C valves and recharged it with a recommended amount of R134 freon.
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