CoolCar Air-Conditioning Centre Hamilton – telling you the real story. 

One of the recent jobs at CoolCar Air-Conditioning Centre  in Hamilton was a 2005 Suzuki Liana with low kms and a noisy compressor. 

The owner only had the car for a couple of months.  The vehicle’s  air conditioning was not working when she bought it but she had been told it would just need re-gassing to get going and that this wouldn’t cost much.  The advice from CoolCar Air-Conditioning is to be very wary if a car seller or repairer tells you that as you may be buying a power load of trouble.  http://www.coolcar.co.nz/news/

Not completely satisfied with the timeliness or completeness of two evaluations carried by other local repairers, the customer brought her vehicle into our workshop and it’s just as well she did because we were able to tell her the real story.

We learned that the vehicle had low refrigerant, UV dye in the system and a noisy compressor.

Straight away, we are looking for the leak responsible.  A lack of oil and refrigerant returning to the compressor causes overheating and excessive wear leading to noise while the refrigerant is pumped out of the system.  No leaks could be found in the engine bay, so there’s only one suspect left and that’s the evaporator under the dash.

At no cost to the owner, we removed the vehicle’s evaporator to inspect for leaks and found as suspected, it was leaking.  We priced up repairs for her consideration with a choice of new and second hand repair options.  Rather than under-cutting the other repairers to ‘get the job’, our advice was that she would need to spend more to have the actual cause of the compressor failure addressed, as well as the remedial work needed to the compressor the others described.  The customer took us up on our offer and her car was repaired in our workshop.

The customer was impressed with the cleanliness and professional appearance of all workshops she took her car to, but she was really pleased that CoolCar Air-Conditioning Centre in Hamilton took the effort to find out and tell her the full story of what was wrong with her car.  She was really impressed it didn’t cost her anything to find out (unlike the other two evaluations, although the diagnostic charge wasn’t collected in one instance) and disappointed neither of the other recommendations involved fixing the leak that caused the compressor to fail in the first place. Although the possibility of leak repairs was mentioned no scope or pricing was given. This is a big deal when the original repair costs mentioned are more than $1000.  She’s still waiting for the written quote from one repairer.

The heater box is out of the car to replace the leaking evaporator

Internal damage to the compressor wobble plate can be seen proving a lack of oil caused the compressor to become noisy.  If the compressor had been replaced without fixing the leak, this will all have recurred over time as refrigerant leaked out again to the atmosphere, contributing unnecessarily to global warming.

At CoolCar Air-Conditioning Centre in Hamilton, evaluations are typically free of charge to find out what’s wrong with your car air conditioning, what we want to do about it and how much it will cost to proceed.  Our free assessment typically excludes comprehensive diagnosis and pricing of electrical faults and extensive dismantling and reassembly to establish a price (but this is not required for most cars) but luckily for our customer it was a quiet day so we undertook to pull the evaporator to check it at no charge to confirm our suspicions of where the leak was situated.

The owner commented that our workshop was conveniently located and she was offered the use of a loan car while we had her vehicle which was great.  She said she won’t always go for the cheapest repair option but would go for the best value and in this case it was the one that fixed the problem and the cause.

CoolCar Air-Conditioning Centres are individually owned and operated and the evaluation policies will vary slightly between businesses, so contact the centre nearest you to find out about an air conditioning evaluation on your vehicle.