sailing_dude

Hi again, I'm going to try and attack that dripping water in the cabin. It is coming from the evaporator, and when I took the screw/clips off the unit I was able to peek in enough to see a ton of dog hair, dust balls, and who knows what else in there. I'd really like to take the cover off and clean the unit off with compressed air, but from researching this, the only way to remove the unit is take the lines off, hence opening the system... Any alternatives? - Jason

myyota

To get to the evaperator to clean it out is not a hard job, but its very time consuming. you will need to remove the dash, wich isn`t as hard as it looks, then you need to remove the heater fan housing, then you will be able to see into the air intake side of the a/c evaperator, thats the area that needs to be cleaned out. You don`t need to unhook the a/c lines at all. In my opinion its not a hard job to do, its just very time consuming. Ive replaced the heater cores in two 86 4Runners and it was a 4-5 hour job just to give you an idea of the time involved.

93YotaGuy

Ummmm I don't know what system you ^^^^ worked on but in order to clean the evaporator you DO have to unhook the lines.

To evacuate and recharge the system ran me about 50 bucks. I wouldn't pay anymore than that and I am sure you can find it cheaper.

The only part of the dash you have to take out is the glove box. This is done by removing the 4 or 5 screws around it. From there you do NOT have to remove teh heater fan housing. All you have to do is simply remove the other 4-5 screws and it should pop right out. That is of course if you unscrew your lines from under the hood.

Cleaning it will probably make a small difference in the cooling and a big difference in the smell. Especially if you have dog hair and other stuff in there. Also while it is out you can get a rubber hose to fix your leak in the cab issue.

myyota

No, you don`t need to remove the evaperator, its only going to be plugged on the intake (fan) side, not the whole thing, so its not necessary to remove the whole unit. You can probably get by with out removing the dash but it would make the job alot easyier. I have taken the evaperators a part before and they were only plugged on the fan side, everything else was clean.

sailing_dude

So I cleaned out most of the crap in there by just opening up the unit enough to get a wire brush in there, which grabbed on to most of the dust balls. The reason for my leaking issue was a large crack on the bottom of the casing - I repaired it with a bit of jb weld. Should work hopefully!