1997 Volvo 850 Climate Control blinking lights

sothernmech · Post by **sothernmech** » 02 Sep 2012, 21:45

Good night you all!!!
The Climate Control of my 1997 Volvo 850 have blinking lights now and have this issues:
-Warm air and dials are at the coldest setting
-Sometimes I get cold air at passenger side and hot air at driver side at same time.

The REC and AC lights of the Climate Control are blinking 17 times after I turn ON the starter switch and is not cooling as it must be. I have changed the AC Compressor, checked pressure and both Hi and LOW AC switches and AC Relay, the blue one behind the glove box and rebuilt its original Bosch Alternator 4 month ago.

Any idea how to solve this issues with the Climate Control ?

Thanks for your help,

sothernmech

Post by **Ozark Lee** » 02 Sep 2012, 23:10

The number of blinks really doesn't tell you anything other than that the climate unit is mad about something. To find out for sure what it is specifically mad about you need to get the codes read with a Volvo specific scan tool. There are some plans floating around for building an OBD-I style code reader but I've never built one or tried to use one. If you can get the OBD-I codes figuring out what is wrong is easy.

Just based on your description of the problem I am guessing that you have a damper motor that is bad.

...Lee

Post by **jreed** » 03 Sep 2012, 05:39

I also have a '97 850 and had very good success with the code reading device I built shown here:
https://www.matthewsvolvosite.com/forums ... 5&p=251436
with schematic here:
https://www.matthewsvolvosite.com/forums ... 43#p251189
The device connects directly to the ECC signaling pin (Pin #6) inside the OBD-2 connector, as well as the +12V and GND pins.

It cost little to make and has proved helpful a couple times so far (for me) to identify the component and failure mode that was causing the ECC unit to blink the AC and REC lights.
Good luck!