lambertius
Banned
- Messages
- 341
Hallo Comrades!
So my car is black, and I live in Australia. This is a bad decision on a good day (living in Australia, black looks sick af) so on the bad days when it is 30+ the cars' interior regularly exceeds 65 degrees. Considering where I live that is about 1/3 of the year, so the car is woefully undriveable when every time you get off the seat you leave a ball sack impression... A few other posts have shown me that this is a common issue in Australia where I've seen multiple people with their new-to-them cars asking 'is this normal?' after having the car regassed and otherwise serviced. I even called up a few service centres and one guy said 'I would never accuse an Italian car of having good air-conditioning'!
So what is going on?
You may notice that your AC works fine most of the time, but then the day gets up above 32 degrees and all of a sudden it feels like the AC is losing. For no obvious reason the air starts to blow warmer, even though pressure tests show no blockages. When you stop in traffic the AC doesn't even seem to be trying, but if you're on the freeway it still seems great! And this only happens on the kind of days hot enough for the predator to show up.
Keeping it simple, your AC works by taking heat out of the cabin and getting rid of it at the front of the car with a special radiator for the AC called a condenser. The maths behind radiators is very simple; if you have a radiator twice the size of another, and all other parameters are the same then the larger condenser will be twice as effective at dispersing heat. I discovered that the North American Spec cars have the same condenser used in the QP, which is also the same one used in the outgoing GTs and is slightly larger than twice the size of the Euro Spec radiator. So part of the problem is that the tiny Euro Spec condenser is recessed below the front bumper so pulls no air at low speeds, and the other part is the condenser is just too small. To fix this I decided to install the North American condenser.
Skipping to the end result so you can decide if you want to follow in my footsteps - it makes a massive difference. The car consistently holds <5 degrees whether in the sun, parked or moving. If you want to follow in my footsteps, keep reading!
So my car is black, and I live in Australia. This is a bad decision on a good day (living in Australia, black looks sick af) so on the bad days when it is 30+ the cars' interior regularly exceeds 65 degrees. Considering where I live that is about 1/3 of the year, so the car is woefully undriveable when every time you get off the seat you leave a ball sack impression... A few other posts have shown me that this is a common issue in Australia where I've seen multiple people with their new-to-them cars asking 'is this normal?' after having the car regassed and otherwise serviced. I even called up a few service centres and one guy said 'I would never accuse an Italian car of having good air-conditioning'!
So what is going on?
You may notice that your AC works fine most of the time, but then the day gets up above 32 degrees and all of a sudden it feels like the AC is losing. For no obvious reason the air starts to blow warmer, even though pressure tests show no blockages. When you stop in traffic the AC doesn't even seem to be trying, but if you're on the freeway it still seems great! And this only happens on the kind of days hot enough for the predator to show up.
Keeping it simple, your AC works by taking heat out of the cabin and getting rid of it at the front of the car with a special radiator for the AC called a condenser. The maths behind radiators is very simple; if you have a radiator twice the size of another, and all other parameters are the same then the larger condenser will be twice as effective at dispersing heat. I discovered that the North American Spec cars have the same condenser used in the QP, which is also the same one used in the outgoing GTs and is slightly larger than twice the size of the Euro Spec radiator. So part of the problem is that the tiny Euro Spec condenser is recessed below the front bumper so pulls no air at low speeds, and the other part is the condenser is just too small. To fix this I decided to install the North American condenser.
Skipping to the end result so you can decide if you want to follow in my footsteps - it makes a massive difference. The car consistently holds <5 degrees whether in the sun, parked or moving. If you want to follow in my footsteps, keep reading!