You must have come across situations where you find your car vent selector not working, especially during the cold winter months. If you face such situations, the first thing you need to do is—don’t get panicked and don’t mess with the selector knob.
There’re ways to fix this, and we’ll help you out to solve this issue.
We know that the car vents provide a consistent through-flow of ambient air into the car. So the internal atmosphere of the car remains pleasant. Car vent selector helps you choose the vent modes such as recirculation mode or fresh air mode based on your selection.
If the car vent selector doesn’t work, then you have reasons to worry about it! But first of all, you need to check out what goes wrong? The diagnosis procedure will take you one step forward to the desired solution. Therefore, we’ll be discussing the reasons causing the vent selector issue while also finding out the solution to them. But before that, why not have a look at how the car air vent system works.
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How The Car Air Vent System Works?
The car air vent system ensures a pleasant interior environment, even with the windows shut. In this system, the air enters a larger duct that’s mostly located at the front of the car so that the entry-point stays in the high-pressure area to get forced in. It then goes to the heater to heat the air if needed. The front foot-wells and vents on the dashboard help the air to get into the car interior. You can adjust the vents for an optimal position while you can also select the temperature control. There are exit vents to the outer environment at the rear end of the car.
So it’s pretty simple how the total system works! As we’ve taken a look at its working procedure, now we can focus on the air vent selector issue and its solutions.
The Air Vent Selector Issue & Its Solution
If you’re a DIY car mechanic, you should know how to gear yourself and work according to our suggestions. We always suggest users wear protective gear before they start dealing with the car’s mechanics. But if you ain’t a DIYer yourself, you can have an expert to help you get rid of this situation. Let’s start taking on each probable cause and their solutions right up!
Common Reasons & Easy Fixes When Your Car Vent Selector Not Working
- One of the most common causes why the air vent selector not working is a jammed vent selector full of dust and debris.
Easy fix:
So it’s important to clean up the vent to blow all of these junks out by rotating the selector back and forth. If you’ve detected it properly, you’ll see the selector is working again and isn’t sticky anymore. Furthermore, you can use a cabin filter in your car to get rid of this problem permanently.
- The next probable reason why the car vent selector for not working could be—the vacuum line has come off the selector valve.
Easy fix:
If that’s the case, all you need to do is simply fix the connection and check out if the selector works fine as before.
The problem can get worse if you have a broken cable to deal with. In this case, you’ve to replace the broken one with a new cable. The cables become bad because the air vent and temperature control doors bind up.
So you’ll have to take control of these parts and allow them to free up. And also, lube the contacts properly so that they don’t bind again any sooner.
- Considering other causes—there’s another common one that happens because of any fault in the mode actuator of the car vent. The mode actuators have a big role to play in the car air vent system. They help the system move positions and determine where the air is supposed to blow out of—floor vents, top vents, or defrosting vents.
Easy fix:
So if there’s an issue with the mode actuator, the selector won’t work. You can diagnose this more precisely by looking at the “mode control servo motor” or “the air mix control servo motor.” For that, you need to take off the mode control servo and manually move the diverter to see whether the selector is just stuck or the actuator is defective. Also, see if there’s any movement in the actuator when you’re changing the modes. If you find the faulty mode actuator is the reason why the vent selector is not working, you’ll have to replace it.
Buy a new mode actuator motor from Amazon.
Also, make sure to take the help of a diagram to see how the vent selector actuator gets back together.
- Moving further with the diagnosis, we can’t miss out on reminding you to look out for leaks in the VAC lines and also see if there are any faulty VAC motors.
Easy fixes:
You must also check out for obstruction in your airbox as well. But these diagnosis procedures apply only if the VAC lines lead to passenger compartments, meaning they’re vacuum driven. If your system is electric motor driven, make sure to check out the fuses and connections with a tester. And also whether the system is getting power or not. This is all about the fixes!
Let’s Wrap Up!
In this article, we’ve discussed all the possible reasons why your car vent selector is not working and what you should do to tackle these causes. From the most common one to the most complicated one, we have you covered for all the potential causes. We’ve also discussed the solutions from the expert’s point of view. Therefore, you can make a short checklist from our article and diagnose accordingly. We’re pretty confident that you’ll be able to detect the actual cause and take the initiative to solve that. At the beginning of the article, you were asking, “Car Vent Selector Not Working – What Can I Do?” —Now we can say that you’ve got a lot to do to make your car vent selector work again successfully.
Friendly tip—Take regular care of your car air vent like blow it out, lube the contact, and do other maintenance tasks to get the selector working most of the time.
