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My 2008 S type heat/air con system has a mind of its own. Typically with air conditioning, when I start the car and select air condition and the upper vents, it will occasionally send the air to both upper and lower vents. I make sure the proper selection is made for upper vents and it is. I have found that tapping (or pounding) on top center of the dash will sometimes, make the change, Otherwise I just have to wait for it to make up its mind to send the air out the upper vents. Any thoughts of the reason and a possible solution
Pour yourself some coffee. Got a bunch of links for you to peruse.
Are you manually selecting the different doors? If left in Auto, the doors don't move much. On a cold day, when Auto mode requests heat, the various doors will move to supply most air at foot level. On a warm day, Auto mode will request cool air and send it primarily through the ducts on the face of the dash. But I'd say on a typical day, the doors stay put unless you've got some wild swings in ambient temperature. So for the lazy man's method, once the doors eventually put themselves in the proper position, leave the door buttons alone and operate in Auto mode. See if that helps.
If you'd rather tear into it, the actuator for the dash face doors is on the upper right side of the heater/evaporator module in the dash. Looks like you remove the glove box for access on a LH drive car. See page 2696 in the manual:
Here's an image, shamelessly stolen from eBay showing the location. This view would be from the right side of the car looking towards the center. The actuator is towards the upper left of the picture, with blue paint on it:
Don't quote me on this, but I think the Jaguar part number is XR857887. This is on the earlier model, but I think the number is the same for all years. The section for later years didn't show any details. See item #11:
It's very likely this is actually a Ford part. I poked around with that number and some of the hits did show a Ford logo. If you remove your existing actuator, you may be able to find a Ford number and save a lot of money.
You may also want to consider cleaning the position feedback potentiometer inside the actuator. This is for a different location, but the internals should be similar:
No guarantee how accurate those numbers may be, but it should be worth investigating. Deciphering Ford part numbers can be a bit tricky. Sometimes they'll change a digit to denote a different vendor or color or minor stuff like that. Or you might find it has a different output arm and you'd need to swap it over. But in general, I've had good results searching via Ford part numbers. YMMV.
air conditioner vent control
