Upon purchasing the vehicle (2000 Bravada) a couple of months ago we started to notice (on hot days in particular) a pet odor in the interior. So I removed all of the seats and set about shampooing the carpets. With that finished, the interior now smells nice and fresh, but to my surprise, decay on startup. That smell quickly would go away once the climate control would kick in.

Ok after a long game of "find that odor", I have some information for all of you. I'm not sure of the year range, but I'd bet something like 98+ S10 Blazer/Jimmy/Bravada. If you get a rotten odor coming from the vents for the first couple of seconds after a restart, it's fungus/bacteria growing on your A/C core. I called the local dealership after reading a TSB (technical service bulletin) stating that they had a special procedure that they go through with special chemicals that just make the problem go away. After talking with the service manager (whom I play golf with every once in awhile), he just told me to go buy a large can of Lysol, unplug the A/C compressor, put the hvac in recirc and spray it into the inside air intake. He just assumed that I knew where that was.

After pulling all of the hush panels off the lower dash and pulling out the glove box, I fount what I was looking for. A big 6"x6" square hole with a plastic grid guard over it. I then came to find out that nothing but the contents of the glove box actually needed to be removed. No screws turned, no bolts loosened. The inside air inlet can be accessed by simply pushing up on the glove box retainer while pulling out on the glove box. The glove box then rotates completely out of the way, exposing said inlet. So I emptied 1/2 the can into this opening, which is a straight shot to the fan and from there, through the heater & A/C cores. I am letting it sit over night and will empty the rest of the can in tomorrow morning.

Now for the other fun part of my day. In order to ensure that the moisture that is taken out of the air by the A/C has a place to go, I needed to find the evap core drain. In order to get to this little hole, the passenger side inner fender must be removed, then it is right on the bottom of the HVAC case. I just used some compressed air to blow up through the hole and inspected it afterwords with a mirror and flashlight - ALL CLEAR! Put everything back together.

Now that is hopefully the end of this odor story. I will report back in another couple of days to tell you the final out come of my adventure in odor removal.

 

thats definatly a good thing to know! thanks for the informitive post.

 

I'll hav eto check that out.
Thanks!!

 

lucky for me i dont use my ac lol im actually thinking about taking it out

 

I will be taking some pictures of the process tomorrow, sadly, I won't be removing the inner fender again, but it is fairly easy to do and the drain is easy to find and clear out.

 

Ok as promised... Here's the pictures that show what to do.
#1 shows the latch that just needs to be pushed up and then the glove box will rotate out of the way

#2 shows the latch and how it works. When you go to push the glove box back in, do just that. The retention latch will just ride up and over the lip of the glove box.

#3 shows the outside air door(not opened). You will need to either set the system to recirc for it to open or pull down on the silver bar in the middle of the ellipse.


I sprayed the lysol into the upper right corner of the opening (which is roughly 6"x6"). I also put a rag over the left side of the inlet to increase the air velocity so it literally sucked the lysol through the opening/fan and into the a/c & heater cores.

 

Hey sorry to asked a question about a locked thread but I have a question in reguard to the procedure to clean out the system. In the article that was just linked it is stated

" he just told me to go buy a large can of Lysol, unplug the A/C compressor, put the hvac in recirc and spray it into the inside air intake"

The issue for me is that I don't believe I have a recirculate function....Am I wrong? I have a LS Model that was built in Canada.

Thank you,

 

If you have A/C, your HVAC system is capable of recirculating cabin air. The door shown will open when the system is put into the MAX A/C mode.

I unlocked the thread and moved your question into it. Periodically, we lock old threads and this one would definitely classify as old!