Climatronic Retrofit

So we’d originally done this project 8 years ago, on our older Skoda Octavia.

It was time to do it on the newer one now.

Too analog, gotta add some electronics to this.

Time to prepare the new airbox. This meant fitting all the servos and removing all the cables. We also took this opportunity to replace the foam on the airbox air flow guides. We used heatlon instead of foam, lasts much longer.

Cutout a hole for the fan speed controller using a hot knife. This is directly in line with the airflow, but before the cooling coil. The fan speed controller has a huge heatsink, which is probably why Valeo chose not to install it after the cooling coil(where air temp would be ~6-10degC.

Climatronic plugged in on the bench with a 100W PSU.

All the servos worked perfectly. But the outside air vent servo(recirculation servo) had a broken gear. The gear had cracked around the axle and hence kept slipping and not turning the flap at all. We opened the servo and drilled a hole in the gear axle and shaft. We then put a fine pitch screw to hold the two together and prevent slippage

The recirc. servo was now fixed and ready to work! We proceeded to install the airbox and wire up all the connections(Instrument cluster, LINBUS, K-Line, 3 fuses, radiator controller, etc). We also cleaned up the cruise control wiring and installed several zip-ties in strategic spots.

We then installed the dashboard and recharged the Air Con gas(R134a) after vacuuming for an hour. I’ll upload the pictures of the dash as soon as I source a climatronic facia!