The a/c doesn’t blow cold on the driver side of my 2004 Buick Century. The passenger side is cool. Eventually after about 10 minutes on max it gets cold. I’m wondering if there’s a dual cooling system or if it’s just a flap or something. Sorry, I don’t know the technical terms. Is this something I can check and/or try to fix at home? Thoughts?
Yes.
It’s called a blend door.
A blend door is what directs hot or cold air out the vents.
But since cold air does eventually come out of the drivers side, could point to a problem with the climate control module.
Tester
If your car has dual climate controls (you can set driver’s and passenger’s side to different temps, this is something fairly obvious) then it might be a blend door. If you don’t have that, then there’s a chance that the system is simply low on refrigerant (due to a leak), and it just happens that the cold air comes in through the passenger’s side of the car first, which explains why the passenger side gets cool and it takes a while for the driver’s side to cool down
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It’s dual control. If I move it up to hot, it does get hotter on the drivers side. But I suspect it only gets cool because I have it on max that recycles air and eventually it is pulling in the car air.
I would have the freon level checked first. You might get lucky. My 05 Lesabre would do this. Passenger side would be ice cold, and driver side was lukewarm. One small can of freon fixed the problem. The freon was added last summer and the ac is still cold, so I assume it’s either a slow leak or maybe it’s normal to have to add a little freon after 14 years of operation.
My car does not have dual climate control, however. But since the driver side on your car does eventually get cool air, I tend to think it might not be a blend door issue. If the blend door wasn’t operating correctly, I doubt you’d get cool air out of the driver side vents after 10 minutes or so, like you stated.