Okay, this car is always a puzzler, but here is what is going on. The air conditioner on this 2004 Jetta with 59,000 miles stopped working after I (like an idiot) sprayed the engine bay with water to clean dirt and grime off that had accumulated. The A/C immediately stopped working. The garage said the pressure was fine and they could not understand why the A/C did not work. My guesses are: clutch is bad (How hard of a do-it-yourself is this repair), electrical short (maybe that connector that sits right on the pump itself), pressure switch damage. If you have any thoughts, I would greatly appreciate them. It is 89 F here and those leather seats are miserable without A/C.
See if the clutch on the compressor activates when you turn the AC on. If it doesn’t work check the connection to it and the fuses for the system.
The clutch does not activate. I will have to go through all the connections. I did check the fuses, and they all looked to be okay, though there is one atop the battery that I just learned about and will check later. I do have a question though that perhaps you can answer.
The manual says to test the clutch by attaching the positive battery terminal directly to the connector at the end of the wire leading from the clutch. Is this safe to do with jumper cables or is there some other cable I need for this? Also, do I need to remove the belt from the compressor pulley when I do this or can I leave it on? (I am assuming I have to remove it, just hoping that I don’t because I really don’t want to).
Leave the belt on. You need to use a much smaller wire than a car jumper cable. An 18 gauge wire should be good.
Alternately, get a DMM and measure for 12V from the clutch terminal to ground. Be very careful as you will have to do this with the engine running and the AC on max. If you get 12V and the compressor is not turning, then you have a bad clutch. If you don’t have 12V, then you’ll have to keep moving back in the circuit and measuring until you find 12V. The defect, of course, will be between where you had 0 V and 12 V.
Good advice from Tardis. I suspect that power isn’t getting to the clutch for some reason. It may be due to a bad contact in a connector. You could try disconnecting and reconnecting major connections under the hood that got wet to see if that helps. It would help to have a test light probe at least so you could verify where power is getting to. A good fuse isn’t much use if power isn’t getting to it.
Thanks for all the prompt replies. I will be testing them all out this weekend and I will let you know what happens.