A/C Service in Kansas City, MO

Plenty of the vehicles moving people around a metro area have two air conditioning systems rather than one. Passenger vans, shuttle vans, three-row SUVs and some crew-cab pickups carry a second cooling unit for the rear seats, with its own vents in the headliner or behind the second row.

That second unit shares the refrigerant with the front, but it adds a great deal of plumbing to do it. Long lines run the length of the vehicle, under the floor or up through the body, with extra joints and an extra cooling core at the far end. More joints and more length mean more places for a leak to start, and more exposure to road debris underneath.

The usual result is a complaint that sounds odd: the driver is comfortable, and the passengers are not.

The front system often keeps working well while the rear is failing, so the person who books the service is the one least likely to notice. A small loss of refrigerant can show up at the back first, because the rear core is the furthest from everything else. A rear blower that has stopped, or rear controls that are not reaching the unit, look the same from a passenger seat.

That is why the most useful thing on a van or a three-row vehicle is to ask the people sitting in the back.

• Which vehicle, and that it has rear air.
• Whether the rear blows warm, blows weakly, or does not blow at all.
• Whether the front is affected too, even slightly.
• Whether it has been recharged before, and when.

Pressures, the compressor and its clutch, the condenser, the front and rear units, the lines between them, and a search for the leak. The national A/C service page covers what a proper recharge involves.

If the engine is running hot as well, cooling system work is in the same building, and so is scheduled maintenance.

Osage Beach and Springfield also offer A/C service in Missouri.

The Kansas City store runs sixteen services and is managed by Richard Kerber.

See the national A/C service page for all 33 locations.