Date: Mon, 3 Aug 1998 17:59:32 EDT
Reply-To: Ssittservl@AOL.COM
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <Vanagon@vanagon.com>
From: S Sittservl <Ssittservl@AOL.COM>
Subject: Re: A/C ducting
Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
> From: sneakers@OZ.NET (Stephen Arbaugh)
> To: Vanagon@VANAGON.COM
>
> I'm looking for some brainstorming here (and I think this is the right
> place!:)
>
> I have an '85 westy with the A/C blower in the back (like most others), and
> while the weather up here in the Seattle area doesn't get too hot for too
> long, travels in the southwest have made me wonder about ducting some of
> that nice cool air up to the front. My thoughts are to use the duct over
> the sliding door: block off the vents in the roof that come from the fresh
> air inlet, and use the added space to pipe air from the ac unit to behind
> the passengers head, put a vent opening there. (If you look behind the two
> vents over the sliding door, you'll see some space between the actual roof
> vent outlets and the added metal for the curtain track) I have also looked
> at the drivers side, maybe doing something similar there, but have not come
> up with any really good ideas yet. Any thoughts?
>
> The a/c seems to be up to snuff, gets the rear of the van cool, but even
> with the vents aimed straight at the space between front seats, it just
> doesn't beat the heat of sun thru the windshield. I've even tried to think
> of somehow modifying the front section of the roof ac from a non-westy van,
> but again, no brilliant ideas. Whadda y'all think?
>
> steve
> '85 westy
> kent, wa
Steve -
Well, I've been thinking about this a lot lately myself, since I have
the same problem - the front of the van never gets cool. I've had
the chance to look into it further, though, because of a more
immediate A/C problem: shredded black foam has been blowing from
the vent slots for a while now. After some discussion on the list,
and taking the van to a VW garage that wimped out and really didn't
do much about the problem, I decided I had to take down that box on the
ceiling myself, find out what was happening, and fix it. Doing that
also requires taking down the curtain rail/tray on the driver's side.
Here are some things of interest that I found out:
(1) The curtain rail and plastic A/C vent shroud come down reasonably
easily. The wooden box that houses the evaporator (the one with the
speakers in it) is really a bear to take down. Worse, it's a big
ugly mean bear to get back up. This is due to the weight, the fact
that it's overhead, and the fact that you're trying to route too-short
wires and hoses through too-small openings in awkward locations while
you're trying to put it up. Just about squashed my poor wife a couple
of times while she was helping me with it. I think it took us about
two hours.
(2) My blowing, shredded foam was primarily a disintegrating foam "blanket"
around the evaporator. I cut the bailing wire that was holding it and
removed the remains. There was also lots of disintegrating weather
striping up there. I also discovered that the cheap plastic brackets
that hold up the blower resistor packs had broken, leaving the resistor
packs to flop around on their wires in my too-often flooded evaporator
housing. ((I'm amazed they hadn't shorted out). Foam padding under the
blowers had also disintegrated. (I should mention that my drain hoses have
clogged frequently, flooding the evaporator housing, so that may have
hastened the demise of all the various foam things. When I was looking
through the list archives recently for A/C info, I saw a message there
from the van's previous owner, from a couple of years ago, in which he
said he was having trouble with clogged drain lines and a flooded evaporator
housing. Wish I'd seen that earlier...)
(3) Anyway, with the box and blowers down I cleaned everything out thoroughly
and put in new waterproof weather striping and padding. Added some in
likely looking places that had probably never had any to begin with.
Made everything nice and tight. Made no attempt to replace the "blanket",
other than more weather striping to make sure air went through the
evaporator, rather than around it. Put the box back up (this is the
wife-squashing part), and found that my air conditioner, which used
to sound like a 747 with a bad cold, was now much quieter. Conversation
is even possible with the fan on "3" or "4".
(4) At this point, I hadn't replaced the plastic vent shroud yet. So,
all the air conditioning blows right out of the blowers, through a
roughly 1 foot by 5 inch opening in the wooden box. I've been driving
the van that way for a week, and made a very thought-provoking discovery:
the front of the van now gets cool. On fan speed "2" we get a nice little
breeze up there. Driver and passenger can breath fresh air. On "4" we
get a gale. Papers on the dashboard blow around. I'm tempted to leave
it that way, maybe with a little grill over it. However, the rear seat
passengers don't get much fresh air (it goes over their heads).
Certainly that would be solvable, though. Removing the shroud also adds
a few couple of inches of headroom over the back seat, giving a slightly
more open look. I should mention that the weather here is 85-90 now, humid,
and my air conditioner isn't particularly cold - I get around 56 to 58
degrees at the air outlet.
(5) First, though, I'm going to try putting the plastic shroud back up,
with some modifications, and see how well it works. First, the thing's
got plastic baffles inside it that appear to be designed to keep from getting
too strong a stream up the middle vents, and to spread the air around to
the various vents fairly evenly. (You can see them if you look in the vents.)
I may cut those up a bit, to get a stronger central stream that can cool the
front of the van. (This has to be done carefully, because the baffles also
help hold the shroud to the ceiling.) Second, the shroud's bigger than it
needs to be - it's got lots of open area (particularly the rear corners)
that's not needed to duct the air. I don't know if those areas "waste"
cold air or not, but I'll seal them off inside the shroud with some big
foam weather striping just in case. If all that doesn't help, I'll
probably take it back down for good.
(6) I found that both the left and right sides of the van have a
metal air duct up at the ceiling, up where the body side meets the
ceiling. These each have a few air outlets in them, and run down
the pillars behind the front doors, then through the front doors,
then under the dash. The one on the driver's side is (in the camper)
used only as a wire run. The one on the passenger side feeds the vents
over the door. Note that the curtain track housing over the door is
not the duct - it's in front on the duct. Foam rubber is stuffed on
each side of the vent outlets in the curtain track to make sure the
air goes out the vents, rather than into the track. It certainly looks
to me like someone creative could duct the air from the plastic A/C vent
housing into these ducts. On the passenger side, it would then blow out
of the over-the-door vents. But if those were closed off, the air would
presumably continue "backwards" through the fresh air system, through the
passenger door, under the dash, to... where? Would it blow out the dash
face vents? That would be nice... If not, could new vents be installed
up there somewhere? Is it possible to tie into the forward end of the
driver's side duct, too? I didn't investigate. An easy experiment would
be to blow air (with a hair dryer or something) into the duct that leads
from under the dash into the passeneger door, and see where it blows out.
I haven't tried that yet.
(7) With so much of my ceiling down, I've been running wires everywhere.
You never know when you may need some power someplace, for a light
or something. I'm planning a reading light over the rear seat for now;
maybe others some other time.
I'll let you know how all this finally works out.
-Steven Sittser
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