Hi,

given that we've just been blessed with a nice spell of hot weather i've finally been able to use my air-con in anger and i'm not that impressed to be honest. was out for about 45mins on saturday and again on sunday, and although you feel nice cool air if you put your hand over the vents the ambient temperature of the car doesn't seem to get much lower.

i've been in friends cars which have been practically like sitting in a fridge when their air-con is going so i was wondering if this is a symptom of 323s in general or if mine has a problem?

by the way, mine definately does have air-con, it's not one of those with just the button

cheers,

ianf

Sound like the gas might be low.

if you take it into a dealer they will say that you have a leak and then spend ages trying to find it.

cost me £900 last year to fix mine they repalced pretty much everything including the intercooler (the air con radiator). cant say if its working as car is in bodyshop.

hope yours is cheaper.

Not trying to be patronising, but the compressor does actually start? bought mine, never owned a car with air-con and as it was cold when i bought it, never really knew what to expect.
after looking around, especially on mx-6 forum i found out the compressor starts and then the 2 front cooling fans start.
Nothing happened with mine, No fans or compressor, Now apparently, (i think) the fans will Not start without the compressor running, and the compressor will Not start without eNough gas, so i had to take it back and get it charged up.
Now, i have a workmate who has an accord, and its painful to have your hand in front of vent, so, it looks like it's a characteristic of the 323, poor ventilation and a weaker air-con system.
i put my hand in front of my 323's vent, and its certainly Not as cold, and as it's only just been charged, i can't expect it to be colder, though to get most out of it its best apparently to put on 2nd stage fan while recirculating, hope this helps. :d

i think you are right, a friend of mine had one as a company car from new and the aircon wasn't great, it worked but it was hardly worth it, so even fully charged and working fine i dont think you going t o see to much improvement, definately worth getting it charged tho for around £50 or £80....

Sorry to hear that guys.

kinda glad i've only got the button!!

mark

Well as it's still under warranty i may get them to have a look at it and if there is a problem it should e sorted for free my favourite price :d

ianf

The wife's 1.5 has air - con as well and it goes down to a chilly 5 degrees c so mazda air con is good.

That's why i knew i had a problem wiTh my v6 as it was only taking about 2 degrees off The temp.

if you have warrenty definatley get it done. if no gas The longer you leave it The more problems you get.

if They do open it system up make sure That They change The filter. it can cost you about £120 if you have to get it done anoTher time.

This might seem like a silly question.... but how do you know when the air con needs re-gassing??? only had the car a few months so i havnt got a clue when it was last done.....

[quote="blackadda1"]this might seem like a silly question.... but how do you know when the air con needs re-gassing??? only had the car a few months so i havnt got a clue when it was last done..... [/quote]

its the old adage "if it works dont fix it!"

Should have the gas checked around every year, though its not listed in the service check, so you are right when you have no idea when it would have been last done. only thing you can do is to check it when its running, from what i gather when its running flat out ie. 4th stage fan with compressor running it Should be around 4-5 c , don't hold me to that though!! if it feels pretty cold with your hand next to vent, then not much else you can do.
Should be around £50-£100 to recharge it depending where you go, if its under warranty, great, but read small print, mine covers all parts, but not gas, though garage admits that there wasn't any gas in it in the first place, so it was sold with a fault.
in anycase, in this weather any amount of air-con helps!

is it just me, or is ithe forum that puts up odd capitals & small case in the wrong parts??!!

Don't know if this is standard practice or not but another thing you can try to get a bit more coolness out of the A/C is use it with the re-circulate button, I assume by doing this the A/C unit is pulling pre-cooled air from inside the car as apose to hot air from outside. Only found this out when I was in my mates Vauxhall which links the two buttons together with a line that says Max A/C. It may already say this in the Mazda manual, so apologies if it does.
I've found with my Mazda A/C that I do have to run it at a higher fan speed than other cars I've had (Honda Accord), although mine is a dark colour which won't help! It was commented by the motoring press when these cars were released that ventilation wasn't the best in the class.

Well, my car went in about a month back to have the air-con looked at and they found an electrical fault which they had to get another company to look at. This was all done under warrenty, WOO!

Unfortunatly the fix didn't last long and it went in yesterday to be looked at again, this time it looks like the fuse for the air-con had blown. I picked it up this morning and it was blowing nice and cool, but by the time I'd got to work it felt like it'd broken again... GRR... I'm now assuming there's a fault somewhere that's overloading the fuse and causing it to blow. Sigh... Back to the garage it is then...

IanF

I have read that the air-con is the main achilles heel for the V6; the compressors tend to leak and need replacing..... cost me £160 just to find that out!! (gassing, checking, finding leak and having to empty gases again... something to do with a greenhouse... )

Now gonna cost £hundreds to get fixed so I think I'd rather look at getting a shorter A/C-Alternator belt and just getting the damn lot removed! Will cost less and save a good deal of weight of the front of the 'ol V6 Understeerer!

guess what... im suddenly starting to not feel so bad about not having air con!! lol

...Glad I could help.

I still wish I had aircon, so don't feel so bad, just think of those horrible wet days in winter when the screen mists up and without aircon you be there squinting trying to see out, not good.

awww thats ok! if i set my thing to cold, put it on 4 and press the windshield button it works fine! takes a bit longer i spose, but its not too bad!

My mate is a refridgeration and air con engineer. He charged my air con for £5! But, the point of this post is that to tell if the gas is low, put the aircon on full (fan 4) and recirculate, leave running for around 5 minutes, and check the looking glass under the bonnet (in front of the battery, behind the headlamp). If, after 5 minutes, you can see bubbles in the system, u need to get ur air con regassed. Hope this helps.

Matt

is seem to be very common prob for this(94-98)323f a/c needing attention. mine was re-gassed 3 times & still not cold so later it needed more than regassing but i sold it before i did something about it & my friends 323f (2 of them) got a/c that not cold enough.

Well the car went in a total of 4 times (fingers crossed it's sorted now), before it was diagnosed as a knackered Compressor!

THEN they tried to tell me my Warrenty didn't cover it, I had to point out the sections that blatently said the only part of air-con that isn't
covered is regassing!

THEN they tried to tell me that it was an after-market air-con unit and that it didn't come as std on my car! I have to give huge thanks to this site for having all the sales/spec sheets for giving me some evidence to show them that the SE did have it as standard. I also took the car in and showed them the spec sticker on the drivers door.

So it finally went in this week and had a new compressor unit fitted, it now seems infinitly better than it ever did before, so I'm hoping it's now sorted. Only taken 3 and a bit months?!?!?

I've been very unimpressed with the dealer, although to be fair they have undergone a change of ownership through all this, but that doesn't give them much of an excuse. I really shouldn't have had to take it in 6 times and had the hassles I had to get this sorted. In the end I'm glad I paid that bit extra for a car from a dealer with a warranty as the compressor cost them 700 quid and that's before labour costs!!!

Anyhow, just thought I'd share my tale... And once again give thanks to the site for the help it's given me....

Cheers,

IanF

Glad it all worked out for you.

Unfortunately £700 is too much for my wallet, especially when labour costs and VAT are calculated (£1100?).

...That kind of money would mean that I could suffer the 1-3 days of extremely hot weather in this country but have a new SS Exhaust, Unichip and torque/BHP increase and prob enough to have a bodyshop sort some of the parking dents! \:D/ (some arseholes should park further away if they're too bloody large to get out of their cars without putting another indent on my panels!! )

There's plenty of people know how crap and expensive Garney's were Ian, thats why if I had any trouble I'd go all the way to Colchester where mine came from before previous owner and sort it out here.
My warranty with the place I bought it from is the same, just regassing isn't covered, even then they done it for nothing 'cos it was sold with no gas!!
Really shows how a Mazda dealership with years of experience don't even know what cars had what, surely they have records? Majorly unimpressed, but not surprised sadly
Any way, glad you got it sorted as the weather is getting colder!!