Diagnosing AC on a 2013 Ford Fusion

Today we’re working on a 2013 Ford Fusion. Air conditioning cools on the right but not the left. Welcome to Mercie J Auto care, where compassion and craftsmanship come together. I’m Rick Smith, master certified technician.

Now most of my videos are geared towards the consumer. I want to help you understand a little bit about your vehicle and I also want to help you understand why sometimes jobs cost a lot of money. Hopefully that helps you have a little bit more faith in your auto repair shop. Today I’m going to do that, as well as talk a little bit to technicians or DIYers. On this particular job, I’ve never done it before and I couldn’t find a lot of great information. The repair manual was not very clear.

So when you have that imbalance of temperatures sometimes it can be the dual zone air conditioning not working right, but oftentimes it’s low on refrigerant. With this Ford Fusion, it has been serviced numerous times because the refrigerant going low. The last time it was in, we had dye in it, we looked at over super carefully and we found out that we could not find any leaks externally. We even use some electronic devices to try to find leeks and they didn’t show up. So sometimes air conditioning systems can have a leak and they can be very difficult to pinpoint. If we are very thorough and we know it’s nowhere in the engine department then it’s got to be what’s called the evaporator which is inside the car. This one does have a small leak, you can’t even see it because you actually have to have the black light to see that there is dye across here. Now on a normal situation typically what we do is we pull the instrument panel. Once we pull the instrument panel we get access to some framework. Once we remove the framework then we can get to all of the ductwork, the ventilation system and everything and that is where we get to the heater core or in this case the air conditioning evaporator. So we always get down to this part of the car. So you can see why these jobs are actually fairly expensive. This particular one the labor guide showed significantly higher allowed hours than the normal job that I do and there’s a couple of reasons for it. 1 is rather than come out in a couple of simple little pieces like I said this one comes out as 1 giant complete assembly. Now for the technicians here’s a couple of little tips on this particular car. Number one is you do have a couple of bolts up here in the cowl, so you’ll have to get access to that. Number two is you do have that entire assembly that you have to pull out altogether not separate. Another thing that you need to be aware of is this has these really long bolts that are almost a foot long and they go in through the door jams into that air conditioning unit so you actually have to remove both doors to do this job. I hope that’s a couple of tips for you guys and gals that are trying to do this on your own or in a shop and I hope this a bit informational to you if you have an air conditioning leak that’s being being difficult to find on your Ford Fusion. Thanks for watching today and until next time safe travels and blessings to you!