felixblack1 said:
thankyou Alan!
though i wasn't looking foward to any solutions which required taking apart the dash. i have heard of similar stories of the heater never being fully closed.
so what your saying is their is some polystyrene flap door which regulates the flow through the heater core. this flap crumbles with age and allows some of the air to be heated. you replaced it with coolite with a better seal. what is coolite? and how did you go about insulating the air feed from underbonnet temps?
thanks
Felix
Felix,
Sorry for the delay but I have some problems here at present keeping me well off the board.
The story about Froggy air/con not coping with "Australian conditions" are just a cop out. Let's face it, 30 deg in London is as hot as 30 deg in Darwin and the Europeans usually engineer to a higher ambiant than the yanks so that is a misnomer. Most car air/cons have a capacity on par with an air/con system you'd find in a lounge room in a house to give you a comparison.
"Coolite" is a term I shouldn't use as it's confusing. That's the brand name of the first polystyrene that came on the market and was made into what we now call "Eskys;" another brand name.
Inside the heater boxes they usually have a deflector flap or insulated panel between the heater matrix & the air/con evaporator. Once this disintegrates, you are left with the heat off the matrix turning the area into an oven and placing a heat load onto the section (evaporator) whose job it is to cool. When this gets added to it a supply of hot air via the air intake it is impossible for it to work. It's akin to having an air/con working in the bedroom & having a couple of fan heaters also going at the same time; one cancels out the other.
Another point also is the factor of icing up of the coil (evaporator) due to outside air getting into that area. If a fresh air supply is getting in particularly on a wet or humid day, the fins on the evaporator will ice up solid within minutes and you will immediately lose about 90% of your cooling which is why the air flap should be set on recirculate. On some cars, as soon as the A/C is turned on, this flap is automatically closed, however on Cits at least, it has to be manually selected.
The air tower I have seen insulated using lagging as used in house construction (slagwool with a silver paper covering) which looks a bit dodgy, however I intend doing one of my cars using cut pieces of polystyrene.
Here are some pics from Shane's site regarding the heater system & the third one down shows the polystyrene flap where it should go, superimposed in yellow.
http://www.aussiefrogs.com/shane/cx2400/Heatercore/heaterbox/heaterbox.html
Also, I don't know how the fresh air supply is fed into a Pug, but on a CX it's via the tower that sits up against the bonnet when closed. This often leaks & also causes a lot of hot air to get into the car. The pic shown here shows how I made a seal out of underlay between the bonnet & actual air tower & it made a lot of difference.
You'll see the cream coloured rim on the bonnet around the vent. That's it.
FWIW, we had to spend a heap of time doing mods to one of the boys BX last week as the air/con was far too cold; it would almost freeze you and was steaming outsides of windows up.
Remember, I live about 4 hours further north than you, so that's how effective froggy air/con can be if the environment for it to work is correct.
Also, be sure that there isn't a pile of leaves or other crap stuck between the condensor & radiator and that the fans are workoing correctly. There's nothing mysterious about air/con & how it works; it simply picks up the heat inside the car & transfers it to the outside, hence keep as much unnecessary heat as possible from passing over the internal coil, so it is collecting nothing but the heat load inside the car and make sure it has plenty of air passing over & through the condensor on the outside of the car so it has somewhere to get rid of it.
The load on the engine (same as a BX) should be minimal. My 16Trs used to do 7.2L/100 klms without air/con on & 7.3L/100 klms with it on. That was a bit exceptional, but these systems don't really drain the engine of power too much unless something's amiss.
Alan S
205GTI 87
