AC not blowing as high

2001 Dodge Ram

It is not the recirculate door, which is a normal issue with these trucks. Mine works fine. Blower motor works and is not clogged with anything. Blend doors all seem to be doing what they should.

AC doesn't blow like it used to. Blows through the 2 outer vents by the doors decently (though not like before), but the inner vents (2 over radio and 1 near glovebox) hardly blow at all. The floor vents seem to blow pretty strong. The defroster vents barely blow at all.

I also cut a hole in interior dash to access the evaporator as well which I saw on another post (genius, btw). Often people get leaves and stuff in there and it decreases air flow. It appeared really clean in there.

The air will only work on highest setting, which I know is the blower motor resistor. I read that low air flow can cause the motor to work harder and blow the resistor (think I said that right). Wanna know what caused it to blow before I replace that, and don't read where that could increase air flow at all if it is replaced.

Thought it may be an evap leak. Built a home-made smoke machine to test evap system, but have been unable to find one. I haven't found any post anywhere on what this could be. If it can be answered, I'm sure it will be here. Thanks in advance for any thoughts.

A few misconceptions here. Since the blower motors in vehicles are squirrel cage fans, reduced airflow will reduce the required power to maintain fan rotation. Clogging the air vents will both increase blower rpm and reduce current draw, this will not blow out your resistor network.

The evap system will not affect anything to do with your vents.

Since you have stated that your motor only works on the high setting (in which the resistor network is bypassed by the high speed relay) i'm betting that the fan motor is going bad and killed the blower resistor. Since the motor is likely going bad, it will not blow air as well as before.

You are probably looking at a new blower assembly and resistor network.

Almost sounds like the piping has come off the HVAC box.

dodge dude94 said:

Almost sounds like the piping has come off the HVAC box.

Click to expand...

Thats quite possible as well, there are other things that can kill blower resistors, hell one went out on my parents old express van simply because it was hotter than hell when they went to florida for a couple weeks.

I hope it is the blower motor. That would be the easiest thing to replace. That the amount of air coming through outside vents is much more than interior ones made me question the blower being the culprit.

By piping, do u mean the chambers that the air flows through from the evap to the vents? I had to remove my dash before to replace heater core. Everything made it back together, I believe, aside from the top panel. It was pretty cracked already, of course, and I thought it would be easy to find a used one so it ended up going the way of the fishes. Now I know, it would be easier to find a unicorn than a dodge dash in good shape. So truck now has that "urban chic" look.