Recirc air not blowing - intermittent

[Bluefish7]

2010 X5, on fresh air the fan blows just fine (its not wind driven air only) but on recirc I can hear the doors moving and shut but very little air coming out on full blast. Air is directed to come out of the main vents and those functions seem to work well on fresh air. As far as I know the filter is fine and not the source of the depleted air flow but will check. I will say that periodically the recirc will blow a good amount of air like the blend doors sit right every once in a while. Any recs?

[andrewwynn]

Almost all air problems with X5 are when you try to outsmart the automatic.

Start with automatic and a reasonable value the car can actually perform. Eg in summer the car will never cool to 60 so it's not a reasonable number.

For AC pro the starting point for cooling is 74 and heating is 68 so those are the best start point.

I'm assuming heating season at your location set to 68 and automatic and make sure the air mix vent has red not blue dots.

You can use a scanner like foxwell to learn the mix flap values on auto they are very logical and do a better ratio than 100% that you get on manual.

Start at baseline and once the car warms to the set point the fan speed will drop.

Based on you intermittent comment there's a common bug with e53 where it will think it's much warmer or cooler in the car and if you have the HVAC model with "max" button hitting that twice about 5 sec apart then turn off the AC would work every time to snap mine out of its confusion.

On wife's X5 that had the "rest" button no max, turning the temps both up to max and back down (to about 73) worked every time to get hers snapped out of its funk.

Use the auto but change the temp up/down to get more or less fan speed. When the fan doesn't speed up when you know it should try the tips above.

When the tips above don't work it's very likely the sampling fan in the dash is broken or the vent to it is plugged.

[Bluefish7]

Ok thanks, yes I have the Foxwell so will plug it in and see what it says. This is when I am using manual fan on both fresh air and recirc, the fan speed remains set at 5 or 6 bars and the fresh air blows that much air but recirc cuts it down to almost unnoticeable. I have noticed the recirc will periodically kick up the air volume then go back to almost nothing while the settings remain the same, like there is a short or grounding issue.

[andrewwynn]

I've had issues on a couple of our BMW where the car apparently thinks it's a different temp inisde and changes the fan speed making it not achieve set speed.

I think you can real-time read the flap % with foxwell so try that. Also try using auto everything and see if you get proper airflow. Manually setting only gives you 100% or 0% flaps. Auto can stop anywhere