[doughboy]

Vinyldj - cooling should be left on all the time, all year. It's not the 1980's any more with old innefficient compressors, the system works best on AUTO with the snowflake ON at all times.

Then on cold days the system will turn off the cooling if its not needed, so you don't need to do it yourself. Even on average days, the cooling runs at a low level to dry the air and the car, with warm air being added to warm the cabin.

Switching it on and off all the time is just making it worse with the evaporator cooling madly at max power and then off again going warm and getting more smelly, just leave it on. Mould can't form on a freezing evaporator, only a damp warm one, so leave cooling ON!

It's called 'Automatic Climate Control' for a reason, yep it 'Automatically' regulates the cooling and heating on its own without interference if you let it.


The white flakes are aluminium oxide powder coming from a dodgy batch of evaporators fitted a few years back, I recall these were changed FOC during warranty, a BIG job.


No.1 cause for these smells seems to be a blocked condensate drain.

Park your car with the aircon on auto, snowflake on, and temp set to 16 (max cool) engine has to be running else cooling doesn't work.

After a few minutes there should be drips and a pool of water forming under the car, about just under the centre console area.

If this isn't happening then your drain is blocked and the system is backing up with stagnant mouldy water.