air cond straining at +91 degrees,,

We have summer temps up to 115 (45 C) and I don't recall the HVAC being unable to keep us comfortable. We have climate control on our models here in Australia and the fan just goes faster.

 

What ? How do you figure that ??

Those who have done it say that it does help.

However........if you leave it sit in the direct sun for more than a couple of hours, it will gradually heat up to about the same end temperature anyway.

 

No nothing YOU can do to improve the situation yourself........except getting it checked out to be sure it is working properly.
And you should not mess with the engine cooling either. It is just fine. When the weather is cool to cold, the engine sometimes has a hard time staying UP to operating temperature.

With my C in Florida after stitting out in the sun shining bright and the temp. above 90 F.......
It takes maybe a good 10 minutes before the cabin becomes noticeably cooler.
During that time, aiming the vents right AT you helps a lot, and convinces you that it is, in fact, blowing cold air.

 

'Cus I've had tinting.

 

A N D......????
Are you saying that your car was hotter inside with the tint than it was without it ??
I just don't see that happening, unless maybe it was E-reflective and was mounted on the wrong side and backwards.

 

I agree with Easy Rider. I've had a car without tinting and my C has tinting. There's a significant amount of difference. I only have 42% all around on my C, but my cabin is nowhere near as hot inside.

 

This study supports you neigh sayers, fwiw. Guess I'll throw in the towel. Still, not a tint fan, for the visibility reduction (I need all I can get), and it's fragility and aftermarket look.

How effective are window tints in cooling our cars? - Christopher Teh Boon Sung

 

Mike & Flo Adams Thank you for the great post on A/C!

We have a new 2014 Prius opt pac 3, (so it has the sun roof, and the wonderful solar panel assisted interior cooling fan). I too have noticed the A/C seems to have to be on HIGH way too long, and even staying on near high fan speed to just try and keep up with a comfortable temp. (71) in the car on a 90-98 degree day. I will probably try your duct thermometer idea as I suspect, the A/C system is possibly under charged. The air coming out of the vents, is just not that much colder than ambient. (It makes me think of the older cars with the manual heat-cool control lever, is the lever fully moved into the blue, cool side or not?) Especially if I compare the coldness coming out of our Prius vents, to the coldness felt coming out of our previous 2013 Dodge Dart vents. Another factor I have noticed, is for the Prius to allow the "auto" temp control to remain on, it MUST be left with the dash vents open only. So if you select the floor and dash vents to be open, it turns off the "Auto" selection.

Another possible theory is that the volume of air allowed through just the dash vents, is insufficient to move enough volume of hot air in the car to "air condition" properly. (Oh, we keep the shade closed on the sun roof while trying to A/C so it is not an impact). The dash air vents are pointed at you, and it is hard to get them pointed in a direction so as to not be blasting cool air on you, while the rest of your body is still hot, due to ambient car temp.. I hope that makes sense. Its like, my wife wants to close off her dash vents, as they are making her cold, as she can not position their air flow far enough away from her so as to not make her feel like she is sitting in a cold draft, yet, the car is still HOT inside. So closing off her vents would only make the air flow less, even making the A/C less effective in cooling the rest of the car. Its almost as if, they need to divert some air flow off the dash vents, / front area of the car, into the back seat of the car to better proportion the cooling effectiveness. (Its why I tried to have the air flow come out through the dash, and feet vents, but it shuts off the "Auto", and it still does not work in helping exchange the air). I know Honda has air ducts running down the center hump, and coming out under the front seats to cool and heat the back seat / compartment, not sure if our Toy has that, but it sure needs it.

It is the first car we have had, where you feel Hot,, and Cold, at the same time, and it just does not seem to balance out to where the A/C fan can shut down to a slow speed where it is not blasting all the time to catch up. We drove to L.A. over the weekend, near 4 hours each way, and the A/C was BLASTING at near high fan speeds the whole trip. Doing this, while on auto temp, the whole time. Very weird.

Is this true for most Prius cars,, or,, is it just ours? Maybe it is just plain bad "Delta T" design. It does make me wish it was just the old manual type of heat n cool slide, or knob controls, so you could surly tell it want to do

 

Mendel, that link you showed was temperatures between fully shaded vs tinted. compare either to NOTHING and that's the thing anyone cares about.

 

it's in the 3 digits now in CA and my Cs AC are holding up fine/great in the heat...however I do have 35% front and 5% back tints. And for people that think tint doesn't matter...it does, it seems to make the AC not have to work too hard to keep the system at target temp once the inside reaches that temp.

for me I find auto climate control useless and even wasteful in lowering the temp in the car...it just and will always have the fan on full blast blowing out air that's not been cooled yet or it'll still have fan on mid to full blast range even though the temp has become comfortable.

Only time I would use fan on full blast is when I first get in the car...open all the windows, have fan on full blast to blow out all the hot stagnant air in the car, drive off and close all windows up again and let the AC do its job.

 

If you set your climate control to cool your car to a certain temperature, it will continually lower the fan speed as it gets closer and closer to the set temperature.

Depending on the outside temperature and direct sunlight, you may find yourself at a point where the car is being heated and cooled at almost the same amount, making it appear as if the climate control is struggling to cool the car. This is a problem in the inherent design of climate control systems. It's not designed to combat incoming heat from sunlight, as far as I know.

The fix is easy. Just set the temperature to a few degrees lower than what you want, which will let the climate control system to throw more cooling at you than heat being added. Eventually the system will reach that 'struggling' point again, since heat is always coming in on a hot, sunny day. At least this way, when the system reaches a 1:1 cooling vs heating ratio, it will be at a lower temperature. You're basically tricking the system here. =P