Do This Once A Year for Your Tesla
I found a fairly easy way to clean and remove the nasty mildew/mold smell from my Tesla Model 3 AC vents without paying Tesla service to do it. This video will also show you where the cabin air filters are located and how to remove and replace them if needed. This Kool It evaporator cleaner will work on most cars too!
How to Remove the AC Smell from the Tesla Model 3 | Model Y
Get $500 OFF your Tesla Purchase 👉🏻 https://ts.la/evan87711
After reading over so many thread pages from everyone talking about this issue. I’ve come to understand that there are two possible reasons for this. One the cabin filters are too close to the evaporator coils. This causes moisture from the coils to touch the cabin filters leading to the filter smelling like mildew as time progresses. If you look closely, the evaporator coils are literally right behind the filters, I mean really, the filters seem to be resting on top of the coils, it’s that close. My second theory is that the drain pipe from the coils is not properly routed. What I mean by this is that the drain pipe could possibly be beveled to where some water gets kinked up. Kind of like your sink drain where you see that curve at the bottom and the water just sits in there to prevent sewer smells from coming up your drain pipe. Now I’m no plumber or maintenance technician by any means and I could be way off on my conclusion. I really think this is going to be an annual maintenance item I need to add to the list. Grab a can of kool-it foam cleaner, spray the coils, and replace the filters every year.
How Much it Costs?
I made an appointment for service on my test the service center here in Raleigh and they told me it was not covered under the warranty and it'd be like 150 to 200 dollars.
How to do it yourself, The Cheaper Method…
The service guy said if you know where the cabinet filters are located you can remove those two filters out and then spray this cool it evaporator cleaner into your coils and supposedly it's supposed to clean or get rid of the mildew smell in your model 3 this is exactly what they use at the Tesla service center in Raleigh.
So the first thing you wanna do is pull your floor mats out and then this top panel needs to be removed and you'll notice there's four pins that need to come out so I just used my fingernail to remove them.
Now that you have the pins removed from the top panel, pull down on it as it should come right down. Next thing I do is unhook the light and the speaker and remove this panel.
We have to remove this whole side panel here I'm just going to take my finger and pull it free and set this to the side. The actual cabin filters are right behind this orange wire and if you can see it's kind of hard there's a Torx 20 right there that you have to remove so I'm gonna unscrew that and take off the cabin filter cover frequent and this will pop open put to the side. You can see there's one of the cabin filters and there's these little tabs to pull on to remove The second one slides up and out.
Turn off the AC and Fan on your Tesla and now spray your container of Kool-It Foam cleaner into the AC evaporator coil area towards the passenger seats. Leave it on there for 15 minutes and then run the fan on low for a good 15-20 minutes.
After this time has passed, run the fans for a good 5 minutes without the filters inserted yet ensuring all the foam cleaner has evaporated. When inserting new filters just remember it goes in with the yellow facing the passenger side. Make sure tabs are out so one up one down and then put the black panel back on and torque your screw back into place. Re-connect your top plastic panel with the light and the speaker; you'll hear them click back into place Grab those 4 plastic pieces and re-insert them into the four holes. Re-attach the side panel by pushing it you'll hear it click. That’s it! The Smell is now Gone! Checkout the video below on this…
Spray Kool-It into Coil Area
Get your Kool-it Here
Result After Using 2 Cans
Foam Cleaner Will Drain through Tesla
Insert New Cabin Filters
Smell Clean Air Again
Protect Your Tesla Seats!
Gyeon Ceramic Coat your Interior…
When I took delivery I did not apply any ceramic coat protectant to my white interior which I regretted later after finding a light blue line in the rear seat from either blue jeans or a rideshare passenger. After trying multiple products to help lift the stain, nothing really seemed to work. Needless to say I learned my lesson and found out that many people applied this Gyeon Leather Ceramic Shield to their tesla interior, especially those with the white seats. See how to apply this stuff yourself…
Tesla AC Smell Update 2020
Has the Smell Returned?
The answer is kinda Yes and No. I recently went on a week-long vacation in July and the car was left in my garage all during this time. I came back to take the car for a drive and I got a small hint of mildew smell for about 10 seconds before it went away. What's funny is since then I could not replicate the smell. I use my model 3 usually twice a day so I’m guessing that smell was only because I left the car in the garage for a week without turning the fans on. You may notice now that after you exit your model 3 the fans may be running for a few minutes. This was in a software update pushed in 2019, I believe it was 2019.12 which will help diminish mildew inside the coils. So to answer your question, after using two containers of kool-it and with the software update, I think the smell has greatly reduced. This will all vary based on your climate. Here in the south with the humidity the way it is, it may be a routine maintenance item to add to your list maybe every 2 years or so. If you live in the north with less humidity maybe only every 5 years.
The Air Test…
Now onto the air quality test. I bought this air quality monitor on amazon just because I got so many requests regarding the xtechnor hepa filters I had installed earlier. I wanted to see if there is actually a deduction of outside fumes when using these products. We can see the TVOC rating which means volatile organic compounds measuring how polluted the air is. This could be anything from paint chemicals to plastic products or even woven fabrics. It appears the inside of my house is rated at 5.2, which is surprising to me but I guess it is true about what they say how indoor air is usually 2 to 5 times more polluted than outdoor air. Now when I walk outside we can see how much of a difference the air is when I speed this frame up over the course of 3 minutes. I closed the car doors and windows and turned on the AC with the air speed setting of 7 on recirculate mode. Meaning the air will stay inside the cabin and go through the internal xtechnor hepa filter multiple times with no outside air coming in. I recorded this session for 5 minutes. It dropped down to a low of .13 and eventually climbs back up to .16. Again I did another test with the same process; all doors and windows closed; air speed at 7 but now I turn off the recirculate mode. We started off at .20 and did another 5 minute time lapse. It drops to .12 and slowly goes back up to .22. I turn off the ac; open the windows and my door and the device goes right back up to .31 in a matter of minutes.
The Results…
So really not that much of a difference using re-circulate mode and outside air. .16 for re-circulate mode and .22 for outside air. Again I currently have the xtechnor hepa filters when doing this test. I even went on a drive with this air quality monitor using the outside air hoping that maybe other vehicle fumes would spike the air reading. Surprisingly it read around .2 for the quick two minutes I was filming it.
So maybe these 3rd party filters actually do something. Who knows it might actually read similar numbers and this could all be over-hyped.