Air Conditioning gremlins anyone?

[Blinkybill]

Has anyone noticed funny behaviour of their air conditioning and ventilation settings. We have an ATX with MANUAL air conditioning.

We have noted intermittently that the same settings eg fresh vs recycled air is not being maintained when you switch off the engine and then come back to the car later and restart the engine.

More concerning, is that occasionally when you restart the car after having had the A/C on, there is no air blowing. Turning the fan speed off then back on does not work. Finally pushing the air conditioning button on and off finally restores the air blowing.

Most of the time it functions normally ie retaining settings and air conditioning comes on immediately if it was on when the car was switched off.

Toyota will look at this when we take the car in this week to pull the dash apart to fix the dash rattle.

[DJKOR]

Damn, that definitely needs to be looked at. The manual A/C controls still use quite a bit of electronics so it's probably that messing up. Probably just a simple swap of the A/C control assembly will fix it. As for the recycled air setting, it should remember that setting when the car is restarted. My Dad's car automatically defaults to the fresh air setting which always annoyed me, but that was part of the design.

On a side note, I wouldn't actually mind if you could set the fresh air setting on as a default. It's good to have it like that when your A/C isn't on as it reduces odours in the A/C heat exchanger. I drive with my windows down all the time and only use my A/C once per week for at least 30 minutes to help keep the system in a working condition, so the fresh air setting is good to keep the smell out of the system. Only problem is the cabin air filter gets dirty quicker.