Kmvguy83's E70 LOG

[Ozer]

Hi welcome. This can all be logged in an excel sheet on your PC vs an online forum, just saying.
Good that you are a DIY guy, you will need to be owning an X5.
Read through the threads and search for things you have questions on, chances are it was asked before and its already answered

[Kmvguy83]

Originally Posted by davidmaria1

Check your climate temp settings in the i drive first. Match the direction of air flow and temp bias on driver and passenger sides.

Will do.
Weather got much cooler these days, so it's kind of hard to tell the difference at the moment. I guess I might have to wait it out til next summer or so.

Originally Posted by Ozer

Hi welcome. This can all be logged in an excel sheet on your PC vs an online forum, just saying.
Good that you are a DIY guy, you will need to be owning an X5.
Read through the threads and search for things you have questions on, chances are it was asked before and its already answered

Thanks for the welcome

I'm aware but excel file logs doesn't really keep timestamps of each updates and it's also much easier to upload pictures on the online forums.

I actually have multiple car logs on multiple online forums.
Logs helped me over time when I was selling the car.
Also it's a very good way to get feedback from owners if I run into trouble or doing something wrong along the way.
This method never really gave me any negatives so I really like doing this method.

Unless it's not allowed on this forums, I want to just keep uploading the logs here.

[Aquamania]

Keep those logs coming!!!

[Kmvguy83]

Update:
-AC Repair

It was indeed evaporator leak as suspected.
Lucky that the car has extended warranty and warranty company paid for the repair.
I'm really glad I didn't have to folk out $2700+ worth of repair out of my pocket.

If anybody is interested, more detail explanation regarding the remedy follow.

E70 with quad zone system has a single evaporator and 4 separate flaps for each of the zoning temperature settings.

Here is the picture of the Evaporator housing (IHKA - Integrated automatic heating aircondition system)
It has a single evaporator in the case. (diagram #5 on the picture)


IHKA with FKA (rear control) has 4 flaps that adjust temperature individually.


It was pretty obvious that the refrigerant smell from the vents were coming from the leaky evaporator since only place that can pollute interior is leaking evaporator. But interesting enough, low refrigerant was also the cause of different temperature throughout the zoning.

Initially, I figured that the zoning system not cooling the same way was due to the faulty flaps but I was wrong on that. When the AC system runs low on refrigerant, low charge causes the evaporator to cool unevenly. This was the reason why the right side of the car (both front and rear zone) was not as cool as the driver side.

Thank god for extended warranty, now hopefully no more ac problems.

Replaced parts follows:
-Evaporator
-O-rings
-Drier Desiccant (Accumulator/Receiver Drier)

Attached invoice:

[ard]

Thanks for the thread. Had not seen it before.

As I was reading through, I got to the AC smell complaint, and the temp imbalance and thoguht 'AC leak'...then scrolled to the final post.

Say, did they use an OE BMW part ($523 approx) or a Behr OEM' ($143)

I see they charged BMW MSRP at $7xx..... I also note they did NOT specify the mfg of that part, just a part number.