I have a big problem and hope someone on this board can help me out. I have a 1998 Galant LS, with 125K miles on it. I am the only owner; car came fully loaded with all the options at the time including the Automatic Climate Control from the Diamante.

Here is the problem, little over three months in the middle of the summer in New York, driving down the highway, windows down… all of the sudden I felt heat coming out of the AC vents, look at the display on the controls and it showed 90 degrees, strange… lowered to 70 degrees, just had the fan blower on no AC, the control unit beeped three times and went back up to 90. Next morning, turned the fan back on at 70 degrees, soon after once again beeped three times and went back to 90 as I tried to lowered back down the unit will fight me back and with a mind of its own will raise right back up, it was actually funny but it became a pain afterwards. I consulted my mechanic; he said the main control unit is bad, called the dealer and they don’t have the “Dash Control Unit” available anymore. If they have it will cost around $900.00, started searching around but no luck, everyone selling used parts told me in their computer system this particular model did not have Auto Controls. While searching for the part I got another problem, now the unit will lower to 65 degrees, will engage the AC and it will not turn off, the off button will not respond (none of the buttons) and the only way to turn it off was to lower the fan speed to zero.
So finally after two months I found a used control unit from a ’95 Galant LS, very happy swapped the part thinking “its fixed”, to my surprise, the control unit will not respond, as you press the fan speeds 0-5 nothing will work until you reach 5 then it blows at full fan speed. My mechanic said your blower resistor is “bad” so we called it in to the dealer gave them the VIN # of the car and we got the right part for the Galant but it did not work!!, this time we took the part out and took it to the dealer, it turned out this part is for the Diamante model (which my car borrowed the Auto Climate Control system). Finally we got the exact match blower resistor, very happily tried yesterday and the silly thing still doesn’t work.

Any ideas, suggestions are greatly appreciated; I don’t know what else to do. Is the Control Unit that I just bought defective, does this car has a computer or a separate AC module? I am out of luck

Sorry for the very long email but I believe if I give you all the facts it might give you a better idea of the problem.

Thank you all,

Figman.