The driver side A/C was not blowing cool air. We took it into Mazda. They replaced the dead driver side actuator but that didn’t fix the issue. They took off the dash and cane back to me with a $3600 repair (parts + labor) to replace the “heating box”. This seems high.

Has anyone had this issue or heard of this? This is out of our budget and since it’s our only car, if we can fix this for a more reasonable cost, we’ll need to get rid of it. Any advice would be appreciated.

We don’t care for the latest model so we’ll need to look at another car brand.

 

That is your problem, it is a $50 part from Autozone. I'm in the process of repairing the driver side, after the passenger side went bad a few months ago. I have a 2007 Cx-9

absolutely love it. I purchased it new. about a $100 labor job. When the actuator goes completely bad, it defaults to the heat position. In the case of this recent one, it started blowing air at room temperature, after running for a time, it eventually opened up all the way to get as cold as the passenger side that I had replaced a few months ago. It is a Santech blend door that someone posted on another forum somewhere, he said it was not listed as the correct one but looked the same, tried it and it worked,
the same as it did for me. Santech A/C Heater Blend Door Actuator MT18602. I bought this on March 14th 2019 for the passenger side, works great!

Doug

dekauffman@gmail.com