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AC odor removal and cleaning

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Upgraded my borescope to a nice wireless depstech from Amazon. Got more photos of the innards of the system.

Here is the inside of the blower fan:
View attachment 448836

You can see some gunk collecting at the fin bases:
View attachment 448839


Here is the evaporator and filter box bottom:
View attachment 448840

Here is a closer view of the drainage system:
View attachment 448841

Here is the blower fan outlet into the filter case:

View attachment 448843

Here is looking down at the base of the coils between the foam:
View attachment 448844

Here is the drain:
View attachment 448845

Another view of the drain:
View attachment 448846

Excellent pictures. The foam at the bottom of the evaporator. That will absorb moisture. It's a design flaw.
 
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My car was received on June 23. Within a month and a half it started to smell faintly. By 2.5 months the smell got bad and started to really bug me. Then I went on a road trip from SoCal to Montana Idaho and Wyoming where it was either high and dry and/or cold. Smells went away. As my trip ended coming back to SoCal it got hot and my AC ran all the time. The smell came back. My car also has 9800 miles so there is considerable seat time with AC on even though the car is barely 3 months old.

Today I applied a can of Kool It cleaner. It removed some of it but did not eliminate, but it was very humid today with sprinkles. Did not change the filters as they seemed ok and did not smell.

Tomorrow I will crank the heat to high and run it for an hour or two, recirculating with windows cracked at work while plugged in. I'm hoping the heat will dry the foam and the moisture will escape through the cracked windows.

I also have another can of Kool it and will use it if it doesn't improve.

Also, i park the car in the garage everynight and I usually crack the windows open.
 
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in the tropics all cars have this. the only way to prevent it is to switch the aircon off 1min or so before you switch the car off...or have some fancy tesla software trick to do it i guess.


I've been switching the air conditioning off when I reach the bottom of my driveway and just let the fan run. By the time my garage door opens, I drive up the driveway into the garage, gather my things, and shut down the car, about a minute or so has passed. This seems to have eliminated the funky smell problem quite well. I only do it in my garage because otherwise I'm unable to remotely cool the car using A/C because manually turning the A/C off prevents this.
 
While Tesla seems to have added an automatic dry out period to their firmware recently, it seems like it's a bandaid at best. If Tesla had solved this problem we would not continue to read about these issues in this thread. I hope they figure out the root cause of the problem and either find a low energy firmware solution or recall and fix the hardware problem. People who say other manufacturers have this problem.... Maybe.... but this is an UNCOMMON problem that I don't expect from a new car.
 
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Don't roll your eyes at me. I know filtration systems and their effects on airflow because it's a large part of my job in regulating industrial air pollution. If this is doing what is claimed, it's like putting a hyper-efficient (i.e. higher filtration) filter on your home HVAC system. That will lead to much higher electrical bills, and increased wear and tear on your HVAC.

not to change the subject, but are you saying it's a bad idea to put the higher filtration filters on your home HVAC?
 
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Did you replace the filter? Cleaning the evaporator isn't going to do any good if you don't replace the filter as well.
Replaced my filters a few weeks ago after having the smell (and quite potent at times). So far so good, no more smell. Just run the HVAC on auto around 70F most of the time and have cabin overheat protection set to fan-only. Previously failed to "bake" the smell out of the system after running the heat on max for 20 minutes.
 
Did you replace the filter? Cleaning the evaporator isn't going to do any good if you don't replace the filter as well.

That was my experience as well. I cleaned the evaporator twice and the smell came back after a couple weeks. The service center finally got new filters in stock and I did a 3rd cleaning while replacing the filters. Problem solved (so far, and now headed into heater season).
 
not to change the subject, but are you saying it's a bad idea to put the higher filtration filters on your home HVAC?

In general, yes, that is what he is saying. A higher efficiency filter will cause more backpressure on the blower motor. Depending on the design of your furnace system, that backpressure could be more than the blower was designed for which can lead to higher electricity costs and a shorter lifetime for the motor.
 
In general, yes, that is what he is saying. A higher efficiency filter will cause more backpressure on the blower motor. Depending on the design of your furnace system, that backpressure could be more than the blower was designed for which can lead to higher electricity costs and a shorter lifetime for the motor.

interesting, i hadn't considered that...i always just bought the allergen filters since we have dogs and figured it would be the best bet. i guess now i'll have to do some research, although my house is only 5 years old so hopefully using the more restrictive filters won't hurt anything too much...
 
A higher efficiency filter may (as in it's possible, not necessarily likely) also reduce airflow (due to the motor's inability to provide enough pressure) to the point that you have problems with the evaporator freezing (can also happen due to being low on refrigerant). If this starts to happen, it tends to be a runaway effect where as it starts to freeze in a few places, the reduced airflow across the evaporator coils causes it to get even colder, freezing more areas, rinse and repeat until you have a solid block of ice preventing any airflow (I had this happen at my last house at one time and it's really annoying to have to wait for it to warm up and melt the ice, not due to the air filter in my case).
 
i hate to hijack this thread even further but i will ask here since i seem to have some knowledgeable people on this subject - as i said i've always used the allergen filters you get at lowes (which are MERV 11), and i'm actually changing them today. my reminder is set for next week, but i picked them up last night so i figure why not...

anyway though, twice in the past 3 months or so (with a 2-3 month gap inbetween), the breaker for our compresser tripped. first time was early morning (around 6am i think according to my home assistant install), second time i don't know for sure because it had been quite a while before i realized it was off since it wasn't that hot outside. this had never happened before that time and i have always used these same filters. also the system worked 100% perfectly the entire time inbetween breaker trips. last time i had a "tune-up" done was either earlier this year or late last year i think, and the tech looked at everything and said "everything looks great, keep doing what you're doing with filter changes," which i have been.

where's the first place i should look to see what's going on? the coils outside on the unit seem dirty but not overly so...cleaning them is on my to-do list for this weekend.
 
We have the 2015 MS85D, which came with the ionizer feature in the climate controls. In following firmware updates, this feature was discontinued.
Soon after that, we noticed a heavy chemical smell in the car whenever we used it. We took the car in for service and was told it was our Lloyd's all weather rubber mats. We removed them but continued to get the smell. To alleviate the smell, we now leave the windows partially down.
The car is always garaged so this isn't an issue, but it does make me wonder if the ionizer would help to keep the air handler cleaned up?
 

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i hate to hijack this thread even further but i will ask here since i seem to have some knowledgeable people on this subject - as i said i've always used the allergen filters you get at lowes (which are MERV 11), and i'm actually changing them today. my reminder is set for next week, but i picked them up last night so i figure why not...

anyway though, twice in the past 3 months or so (with a 2-3 month gap inbetween), the breaker for our compresser tripped. first time was early morning (around 6am i think according to my home assistant install), second time i don't know for sure because it had been quite a while before i realized it was off since it wasn't that hot outside. this had never happened before that time and i have always used these same filters. also the system worked 100% perfectly the entire time inbetween breaker trips. last time i had a "tune-up" done was either earlier this year or late last year i think, and the tech looked at everything and said "everything looks great, keep doing what you're doing with filter changes," which i have been.

where's the first place i should look to see what's going on? the coils outside on the unit seem dirty but not overly so...cleaning them is on my to-do list for this weekend.

Continuing the thread tangent... I'm not sure why the breaker would trip (I'm an engineer, but not an HVAC technician so this isn't my specialty). Clogged filter or dirty coils causing too much current draw would be the most likely culprits, but that doesn't sound likely in your case. I've had the capacitor on my unit fail 4 times and the fan motor fail once. In both cases, the A/C wouldn't work, but the breaker never tripped.