Cold Heat? Hot AC? Diagnose Temperature Problems In Your Car or Truck

When you turn your air conditioning on, do
you have heat blowing out of one side and ice cold AC coming out of the other? That's what we're gonna talk about in this
video. This happens to be a GM vehicle with a dual-climate
system. Most other vehicles should work the same or
very similar. What the dual-climate system actually does
is it allows the passenger to have a different temperature than the driver. If the passenger is a little bit cold, they
can turn the heat up a little bit and they can be warm, and vice versa. Now how this system works, it actually has
two different actuators and two different doors that can blend the temperature. Now you could have these temperatures set,
so one side is at 90 degrees, one side's at 60 degrees. That would mean hot air is coming out of one
side, cold air coming out of the other.

Now the easy fix for that would just be adjusted
so they're at the same temperature. Now, in some cases, you may have the temperature
set to the same level, you'll have hot air coming out of one side, cold air coming out
of the other. In that situation, something's gotta be addressed. Now, if this happened after you disconnected
the battery or had to jumpstart your vehicle or your battery died and you put a new battery
in, there could be something wrong with the programming of the module itself. Now, if you go to start the vehicle for the
first time after the battery was disconnected and you move these controls, the HVAC control
module does a self-test and tries to find where the blend doors are located.

If you interrupted that, they're not gonna
be in the accurate spot. That needs to be recalibrated. If that was the case, sometimes what you could
do is disconnect the negative terminal on the battery. Let it sit for a while, give it maybe five
minutes and then reconnect the terminal. When you go to turn the key on, don't touch
anything on the HVAC control head. Hopefully, that resets. Now, before you did that, if you have a powerful
scan tool, it's a good idea to check the HVAC control module for codes and see what pops
up. If you have any temperature control circuit
codes, then disconnect the battery isn't gonna fix your problem, there's gonna be other issues. Now with the scan tool, what you can actually
do is see where the position of the door should be, which in this one, the left door is the
one that's giving us a problem. It's commanded to 255, that's just a value
and the actual door position is at 30, which isn't good. If you move the adjustments, it should move
the command and the actual should go along with it.

pexels photo 5877455

In our case, we have a problem with the actuator,
it's gonna need to be replaced. And this one is on the passenger side and
this is the commanded position and the actual. These ones are working properly and that's
how it should look. Now, the actuator that's bad on this vehicle
is on the driver's side. Right above the gas pedal, it's connected
to the HVAC box right there. This is what the actuator actually looks like. Now, this side goes to the door that goes
into the heater box. This is what the connector connects to, and
there's where the screws go in. In most cases, most vehicles will have the
driver's side actuator on the driver's side, just like that, passenger on the passenger
side, but some vehicles it'll be on the bottom of the heater box or on the top of the heater
box. On some vehicles, you may notice a clicking
noise coming from this actuator, and there's actually gears inside there.

And in those cases, most of the time, these
need to be replaced. And if you take the cover off this and this
is what it looks like inside. There's an electric motor, and that will turn
these gears. And sometimes these gears wear out, they're
plastic. You could get a flat spot and that's gonna
cause this not to work properly.

And, as you can see, this one actually has
a crack in it and that can potentially cause the gear to not be able to turn the shaft
right here, and that's most likely why this one actually went bad. Now you could always have a mechanical problem
with one of the doors being stuck, something is broken or a temperature sensor isn't working
properly, or even the head unit itself isn't working, but most of the time, it's the actuator
itself. If you enjoyed this video, please subscribe
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