What would you do IF you had to replace your A/C evaporator-core?

I'd have to know the cost, the car value and condition, and of course, my options. idk where you live, but I wouldn't be happy without a/c.

 

I have such vehicles . They driven during their respective seasons. Easy enough. In a pinch they can be driven by someone wanting to. Just not me

 

It's a pretty expensive repair. This is one of those cases where the car was just not designed to be repaired. To swap this out the entire dash has to come out. The evaporator is right in the center, there is no short cut. So if you have to pay for labor it will be $$$. The replacement part isn't cheap either.

We had our evaporator fail while it was under warranty, one of those "buy our carefully inspected and high quality used Toyota and get 90 days warranty on everything" deals, so the dealer fixed it. Eventually, after many trips. Even they screwed up the reassembly, forgetting to plug in one of the actuators, which I didn't realize until quite a while afterwards when the air flow could not be redirected.

The thing is, in a hot climate a Prius without A/C is not only a death trap for the occupant, it would also be a death trap for the HV pack, which would be forced to run at much too high a temperature. So if it were mine I would either have to repair it or junk it. Since I'm retired and have the time I guess I would fix it, making it a roughly $1000 repair (the part plus paying an A/C shop to pump out any remaining refrigerant, and charge it back up again later. Come out $5000 or more head versus scrapping it and buying another used car.

 

More hours than I'd like to spend on the issue time wise .

 

Then if I'm going to do that the car needs to be real nice and we're going to do the damper motors and all that nonsense is down there while we're doing this so never to be visited again . maybe for an 04 05 original nightshade nightshade

 

As I recall when the dealer was working on ours (which would lose all of its refrigerant quickly) they first did a refill (which went poof), then they replaced either the high side or low side pipe (don't recall which, it still leaked). At that point I think they came to the conclusion that since it wasn't leaking any place they could see it must be leaking somewhere they couldn't see - so the evaporator. There must have been dye in it by this time and they may have seen dye coming out the condensation tube. Is there dye in yours? Will it work long enough and well enough to get some condensate out? Having the dye come out there is a pretty definitive sign that refrigerant is leaking into the air within the evaporator. There are refrigerant detectors which helps with this hunt, but it isn't a common tool for a home mechanic to own.