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AC blowing cold on one side and hot on the other... MANUAL AC controls, no blend door
Hey there fellow Mini owners, I recently was topping up the refrigerant on my moms 2006 R50. System still had refrigerant in it so didn't put a vacuum on it before topping it up. Purged my gauges, filled it so the low side is in the 35-40 range, left the car running for 5 minutes and came back to the high pressure side in the 290 PSI range! Did a bit of research and found out about the radiator fan low speed resistor problem so bypassed the resistor and got the low speed working again. Verified AC pressures again and they were low once again (low side around 25 psi and high side at 120 psi so the low speed fan helped high side pressure go down) so after topping it up again i got the low to 40 psi and the high side to 250 psi (29C day).
. <----- (before rad fan fix, 25 psi low, 290 psi high)
(After replacing rad fan resistor 25 psi low and 120 high)
(After rad fan resistor and more refrigerant 40 psi low and 250 high)
After checking the temps in the car the vents are warm on the driver side but ice cold on the passenger side so I immediately thought of a blend door issue like on my automatic ac controls in my Volvo, but 5 minutes later I realized this car has manual ac controls (manual fan control, manual temp control, manual placement control) so I knew there was no blend door.
So I pulled the glovebox off, saw the glovebox cooling tube and decided to stick a thermometer in there to measure evap temperatures... The evap is 3C on the passenger side and if you stick the thermometer a bit further to measure the driver side evap temp... ITS 47C!!!!!!!
Evap temp passenger side
Evap temp driver side
Do you guys have an idea what it could be? Is it possible the heater core is somehow bleeding heat through the flap to the evaporator? I'm thinking it's the expansion valve... I might stick a camera through the glove box cooling hole but I doubt I'll see anything alarming... Car is holding pressure so it's not a leak!
. <----- (before rad fan fix, 25 psi low, 290 psi high)
