My wife's 1997 Mondeo 1.8LX's aircon has started behaving strangely. It usually works fine, but on several occasions recently, it has stopped working while the car was sitting in a traffic jam. Once out of the traffic jam, it remains non-functional for a seemingly arbitrary time period (anywhere between 10 and 30 minutes), then starts working again. I am fairly certain that the compressor is still running when it's not working: turn it off & on, and the engine revs drop & increase as you'd expect.
So, we called out the local mobile aircon specialist, and he said the symptoms were not familiar to him. We did however decide to have the car de-gassed and re-gassed just to see if that fixed it. Unfortunately it didn't: exactly the same thing happened again a few days later.
My gut feeling is that it will cost a lot of money to get this fixed, and since the car is probably worth about zilch (10 year old Mondeo,
170k miles), it might be better to accept that the time has come to replace the old workhorse. But before we do that, I thought I'd ask here if anyone recognises the symptoms and can suggest a likely cause.Thanks.