Much is said about the drying effect of car air conditioning but does it still happen with electronic climate control in cold weather?
Surely if the outside temperature is 'cold' and heat to the cabin is required then with ECC the chiller will not be operational and therefore no condensation will form on the exchanger and thus there cannot be any drying.
Is this right or what??
Cheers. Roger.
Erm, not necessarily. You would have to look at how the system was wired up - or rather "aired up".
For example, if the climate control has a defrost setting to direct most or all of the heat to the windscreen, it's possible that the air is first cooled by the air con before being passed over the heater matrix. This is to condense any moisture in the air in order to make sure the air to the screen is dry, much aiding the defrosting.
On older cars with a simple manual blend flap rather than electronically climate control, both the heater and cooler may be working, with the temperature of the vented air being set by blending variably the hot and cold air streams.
There isn't any real reason, other than the economy of not running the air con compressor all the time, that the same system may not be used in a car with electronic control! The only difference might be that the blending of hot and cold air is controlled electronically to arrive at a constant, defined temperature, whereas older cars with manual control don't set specific temperatures, they just set a certain hot/cold blend ratio based on the position of the temperature slider/ rotary control.
Having said that, for efficiency it's more likely that modern cars have more sophisticated plumbing alongside the more sophisticated electronic control. Perhaps they have the option to work either way? After all, you might want to choose between dried air and non-dried air? Do any cars have such control options?
Michael
Most climate control systems run the aircon continuosly when in 'auto'mode unless the 'econ' or 'economy button is pressed so the dry air theory still applies
Yes.
Air conditioning systems usually shut down when the temperature gets too cold (four degrees is the usual temperature), however above this they'll work just fine, and they'll remove most of the moisture from the air. This said, an Alhambra I used would run the air conditioning system when it was below freezing for a bit, then it shut itself down, then it started up again - probably because the gubbins wasn't quite as cold as ambient.
If you have an ECON or Economy mode on the climate control, this will try to maintain the temperature without using the compressor, so should work just great in winter, excepting of course that you do need to use the compressor all year round (to avoid the seals drying up on you) and you may find it mists up in wet weather.
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