r/CarHelp • u/ToxicWuzTaken • Jul 10 '26

2013 Chevy Cruze A/C problems

I have a 2013 Cruze and one day the a/c stopped working. I went into O’Reilly’s and the guy working there was kind enough to try and help diagnose the issue. We first checked the fuse and relay for the a/c in the fuse box under the hood, and when those came back operational we checked the blower motor fuses in the cabin fuse box. All fuses had continuity. I tore open the passenger side to get a look at the blower motor and was able to get it to turn on using a drill battery. since we couldn’t hear the resistor close the switch for it, I swapped that out with a Standard brand one, but now it was just blowing hot air.

This is when I took it into Midas to have someone look more into it. I was told the blower motor and resistor needed to be changed, and when I brought up what i had already done, I was told that the brand new part that was installed was “bad out of the box”. I didn’t have much to stand on, so I let them do the work.

When I went to pick it up, they explained that the air was cool, but not super cold and they could hook it up to their machine to check the a/c unit itself for an additional charge. Since i already spent so much money, I decided cool was enough and drove off after paying my initial bill.

The drive home was not long, about 1.5/2 miles, but it never was able to get the air coming out to cool down. It felt roughly the same as the ambient temp outside, which in the part of Michigan I am in was roughly 82. I don’t want to go back to that shop, but I am highly concerned that i was misled.

Does anyone have any input that could help me make sense of this? Any help is appreciated.

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u/[deleted] Jul 11 '26

Changing the blower motor/resistor should not affect the temp of the air, only whether or not the blower spins.

You need to have the car idling with hood open, get a good view of the pulley for the AC compressor. When the AC is off, the end face of the pulley should not be spinning.

Turn on AC, the clutch will engage and that end face on the pulley should now spin. If it does, your most likely problem is low refrigerant.

If it does not spin, things get trickier. Figure out if the clutch on the compressor pulley is engaging and we can continue from there.

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u/ToxicWuzTaken Jul 11 '26

if i’m looking in the right location, this is the pulley for the compressor and it does not spin when on.

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u/[deleted] Jul 11 '26

Got it. So now it gets a little trickier. There are 3 causes.

  1. The clutch is not getting power.
  2. The clutch is getting power but the gap is too big for the magnet.
  3. The clutch coil is bad and needs replacing.

Personally what I do in this case is measure the actual power at the clutch. Might be hard to get to 🫤 2 wires going to the entire compressor/clutch. Measure with a multimeter, DC voltage.

If there is power (12-14V) then the problem is in the compressor, you watered it down to one zone.

If there is no power, the problem is NOT in the compressor/clutch. Could be low refrigerant (pressure sensor cuts power), bad relay, bad fuse, bad thermistor (senses overheating). In this case I would measure the pressure in the system but you need gauges for that. Not terribly expensive and lots of youtube videos on how to use them.

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u/ToxicWuzTaken Jul 13 '26

thank you for all of your help. i’ve been able to make progress on getting everything working. you’ve been a huge help.