Quote:
Originally Posted by darkdeacon
Just for my own education/curiosity, maybe you can help me understand the system a bit better. In the attached jpeg, the ice cold cooling pipe splits into two... the top is very cold, but the other is only slightly cool. Why?
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Those two fat pipes are the refrigerant return lines from the evaporators in the cab. The skinny line underneath them (with the black cap on the fitting and the pressure sensor with wires coming out of it) is the high-pressure liquid refrigerant line, taking the 'loaded' refrigerant to the two evaporators. The orifices that I mentioned in my previous posts will be much closer to the evaporators that they feed.
Unfortunately, return pipe temperature only tells part of the story. Without knowing which pipe comes from which evaporator, there's now way of knowing whether the warm one is a blocked front evaporator orifice and the cold one is the working back evaporator, or the other way around, the warm one is the one coming from a working evaporator in the rear that is having all the cabin heat transferred to it and the cold one is coming from the front which has a stuck blend door and isn't getting any cabin heat transferred to it at all.
However, if I were a betting man, I'd stick to my original diagnosis. I'd give 5 to 1 that it's a blocked orifice of some sort at the front. Unfortunately, that's likely to be the more expensive diagnosis as well. Hopefully since you had the repair done by a national chain, you can bully them into making right for you. My guess is that they didn't successfully flush all the crap out of the system. They may not have realized (or cared) that there are two evaporators in the Pilot, which I imagine complicates the flushing process (one can be clear and make the whole system look clear while the other remains blocked, sort of thing)
Mark you, I'm anything but an AC tech, hell I grew up in a country where there was no AC. However, I did have to fix the AC in my old Ford about 6 months ago, before I bought the Pilot , so I've recently read up on the topic.