Hey Brickboard members!
I have a new friend that has worked on the heating and aircondition arena for 20 years. We where talking about the Brick and got in the Ac section, and I made the comments about the large failure rate of the evaporator and its composition aluminum. His first coment was that on the middle 80's some companies tried this on the condensor coils the unites that sit outside the house and the A coils inside the house also known as evaporator coils had a very large failure because the aluminum was been attacked my metal particles on the air, in others, it was reacting with the particles and creating pinhole leaks everywhere. Later on Volvo introduce the filter that sits outside the hood but the problem according to him, " any metal particles or slivers that the fan would produce has it wears out can attacked the evaporator because its between filter and evap. I think that S70's had the filter relocated to a position between the fan and evap. similarly to a system on a house. Aluminum also tends to fail when it freezes because of a clog drain. In some areas they use to spray a none reactive coating on the condensor similarly to a sealant and a popular name was micro guard 35. Recently, volvo has introduce the automatic ramp up of the fan in order to cool the coil and keep the moisture out. You can probably quess what the HVAC industry did after using aluminum they went back to copper after 2 years only. His final advice was when replacing that evaporator:
1. Don't use OEM but copper only,
2. You might consider applying the sealant if desire,
3. Make sure the drains are clear and might consider enlarging them,
4. When using Ac always keep the fan runing even after turning off: Low speed was fine.
5. Becarefull with the charcol filters they can minimize the amount of air been push to the coil and can freeze the condensor and compressor too.
6. Never run the Ac when the temperature is below 50 degrees: not very good to the compressor.
Feel free to add to my list!