The mrs is constantly on at me that her air con in the 1.4ma is not working. Had gassed last week despite it only being slightly down on pressure. Think they took 420g out and put 450 in.
Had it plugged in to MES no faults logged and everything is operational.
she doesn’t use car for long journeys just local stuff,whenever I have used to go on a motorway run I find that it does work just takes a while to have any effect on cabin temp. Especially compared to my 5 series that seems to be blowing cold within seconds.
Are the G air con systems known to be a bit on the weak side needing a good amount of time to work? Maybe as a result of a fairly small system with only 450g
just to add fan out put is fine and pollen filter is brand new.
I'm in Australia, and I find it pretty weak. My G is brand new btw, so no faults. I was a bit surprised, its gets reasonably warm by european standards in the south of italy...
If I've left it parked in the sun on a 40 plus day and the temperature on the dash reads 55, the AC takes quite some time to pull the cabin temp back down
The heater sucks too, takes forever in winter for it kick in.
I'm in Australia, and I find it pretty weak. My G is brand new btw, so no faults. I was a bit surprised, its gets reasonably warm by european standards in the south of italy...
If I've left it parked in the sun on a 40 plus day and the temperature on the dash reads 55, the AC takes quite some time to pull the cabin temp back down
The heater sucks too, takes forever in winter for it kick in.
not experience 40 degree temps over here but in the upper twenties to mid 30’s we have been having the air con is pretty much what you have just explained.
In MES in control module for the Engine you can find AC pressure and fan speed. At least mine starts to blow cold air before I have backed out of my garage.
I will have a check on engine controller see what pressure it is running at. I can feel cold air starting after a few minutes but it is just weak and struggles to overcome the cabin temp.
Can you stick a temeprature probe in one of the vents, like 10cm in, and measure the temp there, for comparison, i get the 11C, 2 to 3 minutes on starting AC, set on low, fan speed on 3, outside temp 33C with air recirculation off. Engine 2.0 175hp.
I think it’s just a poorly designed system it all functions as it should just doesn’t really cool the car. We went out in mine today and mrs said before we even left the road how come your air con is quiet and it works.
as above it will mist screen up when on low but on face it’s not good. my suspicion is it’s because it’s a relatively small circuit so struggles on hot days. On screen the air flow is coming out of less vents so when on face the air flow is spread more so loses its effect.
I tried loggin the temp on my way to the store today. Wanted to try MES with my new Surface also (dropped connection after this for some reason). Outside temperature today was 27 degrees. I start the car about 5 sec into the graph, so after 45 seconds of running the air temp at the wents are below 10 degrees C. I just left the climate controll to auto and set to 21 degrees.
yeah i agree it seems to feel weak, yet if you direct air to the windscreen it has no issues with making the outside of the windscreen fog up while driving.. So the air is definitely cold, i just don't feel it much.
It is probably designed to drop the temperature a certain amount below ambient. If it is 36ºC outside and it drops the temp by 15ºC then it will still be warm...
Having said that, I always found the G's aircon ok if not brililant up until recently. I think most modern cars have less effective aircon than in the past due to the pumps being made to have less load on the engine, refrigerant being better for the environment etc.
I don’t know about that the beemers I have had the air con is Baltic in no time,different type of compressor as it doesn’t have a clutch it always runs at 5% to circulate refrigerant and when it’s on the compressor is controlled by PWM via the DME.
Even the 69 plate transit at work gets that cold you have to switch fan down.
It’s only the G I seem to have an issue with, good job I don’t drive it much or it would really annoy me.
This sounds very familiar - the air con and climate control was one of my main bugbears with the Giulietta. The air con needed recharging twice in 18 months - on the second occasion it was discovered by Motorvogue Northampton that it was actually leaking, odd for a 2 year old car. TH White Swindon either failed to notice this the first time or it wasn't leaking at the time - I think I know the answer. However even after it'd been fixed for the second time and the problem didn't re-occur, the air con was still only ok at best.
As others have mentioned, if you were on a long journey it would get going but on anything around 10 miles or less or journeys that didn't take in a fast road, it was hopeless. The systems' persistence at automatically activating the air con even in manual mode used to drive me absolutely mad too, as I only use it for cooling and occasional demisting and don't leave it running the whole time. It didn't seem to be possible to ever completely operate the climate control in full manual mode like in other cars.
Although FCA diesels are known to take an age to heat-up, the air con issue isn't a general Alfa or Fiat weak point as my MiTo and Fiat's, particularly the current Tipo, are icy cold within seconds of starting the engine.
This sounds very familiar - the air con and climate control was one of my main bugbears with the Giulietta. The air con needed recharging twice in 18 months - on the second occasion it was discovered by Motorvogue Northampton that it was actually leaking, odd for a 2 year old car. TH White Swindon either failed to notice this the first time or it wasn't leaking at the time - I think I know the answer. However even after it'd been fixed for the second time and the problem didn't re-occur, the air con was still only ok at best.
As others have mentioned, if you were on a long journey it would get going but on anything around 10 miles or less or journeys that didn't take in a fast road, it was hopeless. The systems' persistence at automatically activating the air con even in manual mode used to drive me absolutely mad too, as I only use it for cooling and occasional demisting and don't leave it running the whole time. It didn't seem to be possible to ever completely operate the climate control in full manual mode like in other cars.
Although FCA diesels are known to take an age to heat-up, the air con issue isn't a general Alfa or Fiat weak point as my MiTo and Fiat's, particularly the current Tipo, are icy cold within seconds of starting the engine.
156 AC is not great but that's mostly because of the awful cabin air flow. Only way around it is just to open all vents and let the ambient temperature fall rather than any sort of direct flow. And yeah traffic or short journeys then it isn't great. Mine's on a brand new compressor so probably works as well as any 156 ever will. Disappointing if Alfa haven't gotten around these issues two generations on, plus the G only has one rear vent vs 156's two. Mind you work Astra has no rear vents!!
Dad's Honda seems to have pretty awesome AC and doesn't need a run up. Astra Diesels at work seem to pump out cold air extremely quickly too.
Sound strange that you all find the Gs AC insufficient. Out of the many cars I have driven I would put the Gs AC on the better side of the scale. I have also driven mine down in Europe last summer with the wife and son and no issues what so ever even with the panoramic sun foof heating up the car. I had to redirect the vents, so it wasn't blowing cold air in my face. I have also lived full time in Thailand in the past so I think I know a dodgy AC when I see one. I still have a 93' Volvo there running the factory compressor and ever though that has much less power than the Gs unit it can cope with 40 degrees heat as long as you drive and get som rpm on it.
On a trip it’s fine - it’s an 8 hour drive back to my parents place, and even on 40 degree days it will keep it cool. But that’s at freeway speeds (lots of air over the condenser) and plenty of time to bring the cabin temp down. It’s good enough to maintain a cool cabin.
The issues are when the cabin (and the dash assembly itself) has a lot of heat soaked into it and the G takes a long time to overcome that. Especially in urban driving at low/ stop start speeds.
It’s not a thing a RHD thing (if there was a difference they might have been able to give the driver some legroom...).
Yes if you start a heat soaked car and leave it on idle any system would struggle. But if it's still an issue after you start driving, even in urban slow speeds it does not sound right. I'm not defending the Alfa Climate control, I also find it a bit hard to get. Any time you push any button it will jump out of auto for example. But the new variable displacement compressors normally handles low engine speeds better than the old style fixed ones.
I find the fact that the mirror heaters are attached to the front screen demist, not the rear screen like every other car not the planet wildly annoying...
But things like Holden Commodores and Toyotas have MUCH better AC and will deal with such heat soak in a few minutes. But luckily we don't buy Alfas for their perfection in all things engineering
Poor air flow could be down to a blocked pollen filter.
Due to its location and difficulty of access in RHD cars there is a good chance that it hasn't been changed in some cases. Even if you get a car serviced by a dealer they often don't bother changing stuff which is hard to get to, such as pollen filters or even air filters...
Safe to say that as I am not the only one with an issue it is just down to a rather poor and weak design then. Maybe it would benefit from a dual cooling fan set up as it’s definitely better when on a motorway run with increased air flow
My cabin filter is new and the air con is serviced. Mines perfectly alright, just leave it on full auto and change temp as and when needed. Blows fast, cold air.
I'd say it's not as good as my old 159 set up, on a par with the 147.
Maybe QV thing has some impact.
Looking at those pictures I reckon the twin would fit on the radiator and just need a bit of wiring to power the 2nd fan. Would need to compare fuse rating between the 2 aswell.
Looking at parts listings the radiators are the same size. But looking at my 1.4 today, I think I see why it got a single fan (it would cost less for Alfa to jsut spec one design across all variants...) - there is bugger all space between the turbo charge pipe and the radiator.
I’m not sure the twin fan would be thin enough to fit... But - some plastic cladding over the “exposed” part might assist the fan in pulling through the whole radiator core.
Might as well be poor software. If the condenser gets very hot and the fan is not set to full speed by the ECU it will not work properly. Even though the fan shroud does not cover the entire radiator it looks like it directs the flow into the fan trough the radiator and condenser, the total flow of air will not change by modifying the shroud. If the condenser gets very hot (enough to set of the high pressure switch of the system) even though the fan runs at full speed it sound like the fan is the weak link.
The high pressure side of the AC system can be monitored through MES to see if the pressure is getting too high at low driving speeds.
Having just looked at mine there is no way the fan can pull air through whole radiator pack with the shroud only on half the rad,as such condenser cannot dissipate enough heat to turn refrigerant from a gas back in to a liquid adequately enough.
This would make sense given at speed the system performs far better.
Ordinarily I don’t notice a massive issue but when ambient temps are above the mid twenties is when it seems to struggle.
Mine definitely isn’t going out on HP as the compressor is still running it’s just the output in cabin that’s the issue.
Since the compressor is a variable displacement unit it might not turn off the compressor completely but lower the displacement to save the system, thus loosing a lot of capacity. I might have look later today since we are expecting around 30 degrees today and I have to drive my son to football through the city.
qv fans work differently. The fans get connected in series for low speed or parallel for high speed. Don't think it can be retrofitted that way
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