AC stopped working, service center says no faults

[Wulf0123]

Hi,
In early July my AC stopped working. Unfortunately, they couldn’t look at it until September. Three weeks later they say it’s ready for pick up, but reviewing the work they said they did nothing for the HVAC. Their proof, it blows out 56 degree air right now and the system hasn’t logged any issues, even though over the summer it would blow hot air if it wasn’t set to 59. And then it would barely be cold.
Asking if anybody else has had this issue. If they were able to prove it. And how they were able to correct it? Or is the HVAC just this poor and unable to handle a summer.
Side note this was with sun shades installed, so it had as much in your favor as possible.

 

[doubletwist]

Hi,
In early July my AC stopped working. Unfortunately, they couldn’t look at it until September. Three weeks later they say it’s ready for pick up, but reviewing the work they said they did nothing for the HVAC. Their proof, it blows out 56 degree air right now and the system hasn’t logged any issues, even though over the summer it would blow hot air if it wasn’t set to 59. And then it would barely be cold.
Asking if anybody else has had this issue. If they were able to prove it. And how they were able to correct it? Or is the HVAC just this poor and unable to handle a summer.
Side note this was with sun shades installed, so it had as much in your favor as possible.

So I can say is that my Air had no proven letting things cool though this rather harsh Texas summer.

 

[raleighone]

My Gravity is in the shop now w an HVAC failure. Sounds like a compressor issue as it makes a loud sound/vibration every :30 or so and won't put out cold air. So sounds like a different issue than yours. Good luck...

 

[borski]

Hi,
In early July my AC stopped working. Unfortunately, they couldn’t look at it until September. Three weeks later they say it’s ready for pick up, but reviewing the work they said they did nothing for the HVAC. Their proof, it blows out 56 degree air right now and the system hasn’t logged any issues, even though over the summer it would blow hot air if it wasn’t set to 59. And then it would barely be cold.
Asking if anybody else has had this issue. If they were able to prove it. And how they were able to correct it? Or is the HVAC just this poor and unable to handle a summer.
Side note this was with sun shades installed, so it had as much in your favor as possible.

Definitely can handle a summer; we usually end up turning it down after a few min.

It may be temp related, which would suck :/

 

[Wulf0123]

My Gravity is in the shop now w an HVAC failure. Sounds like a compressor issue as it makes a loud sound/vibration every :30 or so and won't put out cold air. So sounds like a different issue than yours. Good luck...

did you get an alert that it failed? Or was it part of a different notification?

 

[raleighone]

No alert...which is surprising. Just the sound and vibration was enough to know something was wrong.

 

[jedwin]

Their proof, it blows out 56 degree air right now and the system hasn’t logged any issues, even though over the summer it would blow hot air if it wasn’t set to 59. And then it would barely be cold.

I also had the situation where it would never really put out cold air on hot days.

In my case, the Natick service center found a leak in the the system that circulates the Freon (or similar fluid)— it took a bit of time, but they found it because the material has a stain which they saw on an O-ring. I didn’t completely understand their description, but my sense was that since the refrigerant was quite low (37% of normal volume), it wasn’t carrying enough heat into the heat pump compressor to have the compressor kick on. Hence, the system was basically blowing ambient air. When the car was in motion, it would cool some, but it would take a long time to lower the temp in the cabin. (the Delta-T that the system could produce was quite minimal, though it did gradually lower the cabin temperature) My car also showed “no relevant fault codes”, though they did affirm that it was blowing ambient air when parked.

Post repair, we didn’t have any full-on heat waves to compare to what I had been experiencing, but I did have a couple days where it hit 80 and was amazed by how comfortable the cabin could be in just a few minutes; and as Borski suggested, I even had to turn it down, which was a brand new experience!

Until it got to the point where it was really not blowing much more than ambient, I had just figured this was our underpowered HVAC…. As turned out, this slow leak may have been there from the start; the location kind of suggests a manufacturing glitch.

When I reported that it was only blowing ambient air when it was sitting still (trying to pre-Cool, or using the temperature “keep” mode when parked), the folks at the Natick service center said they had not ever heard of that before, but it did spur them to dig deep enough to find the leak. I’m crossing my fingers that what seems like a solution will still hold when we hit high summer next year.

Are you feeling like you’re getting more cooling now that it’s not quite so hot outside, or still a similarly luke-cool output? It could be worth mentioning this low refrigerant solution to your service people; feel free to DM me if you want more details or documentation.