I have a 1998 Ford Explorer Eddie Bauer with 102k miles and have been having A/C issues. The A/C will only blow hot air and in addition, there is a rattling noise when I idle. I took it to a repair shop and they said the hot air and the rattling are related due to a leak in the evaporator.
The estimated price was $1066. Are leaky evaporators common for my car at its age and is this a reasonable estimate?
Like ShopDog said it is likely the blend door which is a common problem and inexpensive to repair it you do it yourself. There is a thread on how to fix it at
As a follow up, the A/C was not putting out cold air at all, so it was not just the blend door. Having the evaporator replaced fixed that issue and it now puts out cold air when on Max A/C. And it only cost $1000!
But the story continues... When I got the car back, it was on Max A/C, so it was cooling well, but I switched it to automatic climate control (at 73 degrees or so) and it started pushing out hot air as before the evaporator fix. When I switched it back to Max A/C, it would only push out mildly cool air.
I took the car back to the repair shop ready to call in lawyers if need be, but he mentioned the blend door problem and said once you go off of Max A/C, it wont switch back on. So the mechanic is going to reset things so it pushes out cold air on Max A/C and I will fix it myself or just deal with it. He offered $200 to fix the blend-door, but I will take a crack at it myself with the links provided. Just wanted to throw that out there.
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