Heating and A/C problems on my '97 Lesabre Limited

[moongirl]

I have a '97 Lesabre Limited with Dual Climate Control. In the summer the a/c works fine on the drivers side, but comes out hot on the passenger side. In the cold winter months I have heat coming out on the drivers side but cold air on the passenger side. I have been given different explanations for this problem, like the accuator is bad or its the blend door. Is this something my husband and I could fix ourselves? We can't afford a huge bill from a repair shop unless absolutely necessary...please help! Any info would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

[pcmos]

Ok, well the thing about this is, if you do actually have a problem with any of the components you mentioned above, you would have to be fairly skilled technically to do the repair. Even if you do have some techincal ability, you would absolutely need the set of factory shop manuals for the car from GM. But one quick thing that you might want to try, and it is a total long shot, but it may be worth a try anyhow is to unplug the passenger side climate control switch and test the system. To do this you need to remove the passenger side climate control unit from the door and then carefully disconnect the unit. This would just ensure that the switch unit itself isn't sending a faulty signal to the climate control unit. All of the control components that direct the air flow in the ducts are burried pretty well in the dash board, and you would have to take all kinds of things apart to get to them. The Passenger climate control module will pry out of the passenger door with a flat bladed screw driver. Just be extremely careful not to crack the plastic as you are prying, but it should pop out pretty easily. Once it is out examine the electrical connector on the back of it and determine how it is designed to be un-clipped. Then once you have the electrical connector disconnected from the passenger switch, try your A/C system out. Again this is a huge long shot, it probably won't affect the behavior at all as this is most likely a problem with the mixers or actuators in the dash board

[moongirl]

Thanks very much for the infomation. Do you know if it's possible to find and actuator at the junk yard?

[pcmos]

yeah, it may be possible to get one a junk yard, but actually what you probably want to do is just check out ebay from time to time, almost anything will turn up on ebay if you wait long enough. Other than that you may want to just buy one from a dealer and save the cost of installation by doing it yourself, but what you should really do on ebay is get hold of those GM shop manuals. Frankly there are very few repairs that I would ever attempt without the shop manuals, these cars are just way too complex today.

[BritBuick]

I had the same thing, and I have a 97 LeSabre Limited too. I bought the car in January and as we have similar weather to you down in Ohio you'll understand I didn't discover this problem until April! Luckily the dealership understood the situation and fixed it with no charge as an "existing condition"... they can hardly have expected me to run A/C in Michigan in January ;o)

In this case it was the actuator if I recall.