Mskierki

Last summer I was driving up the highway with the A/C and started to hear some noise like high pressure gas escaping in the engine bay. I turned off hvac system and the radio. There was no decline in performance from the engine however the hvac system did not cool at all. With the fan turned all the way up it the air only seemed to deposit moisture when my hand was held near the vent. This is an obvious sign of a vapor-compression system failure.

Later that day we took a look under the hood and there were a few cracks visible in the case of the compressor.

We replaced the compressor, filter and descant bag per the manual. FYI: the bottom left bolt of the compressor was very difficult to access.

After pulling a vacuum and charging the system it still was not functioning correction and the compressor would shut down due to activation of the high pressure switch. This led us to believe that the TXV was at fault or there was something blocking the system.

We pulled the blower and evaporator out of the car and replaced the TXV. When we tapped the TXV we were able to hear a small noise and the old part seemed to be operating normally again. There must have been some debris that had jammed the valve. After everything was replaced and charged it appears that the system was again functioning normal.

We disassembled the compressor and determined that half of the scroll compressor catastrophically failed. However it appears that it went quickly and the spring valve kept most of the larger pieces inside the compressor itself.

TexasHonda

Possible lack of lubrication or too tight tolerances.

I thought scroll compressors had no contacting parts, so failure would be either defective part or poor design. There are a number of animations on the www but I did not see anything about amount of contact between parts. They do mention that tolerances are very tight! It's not hard to see how a tiny manufacturing flaw could lead to failure.

I had a scroll on a Subaru that failed due to cracking of the rotor hub. It stopped like a heart attack and belt jumped off.

How much trouble was blower and evaporator removal?

regards

demitrix

I had the exact same issue. Hopefully I can skip some of the steps now and get my AC back up and going for these 100* day,s