Good question! I was wondering how much of a job it would be to fit the compressor myself, but with the weather being as bad as it has been and nowhere suitable undercover for me to do it I decided to let a professional sort it out for me. To be honest I'm glad I did as Rock Auto (who I bought the parts from) say you must also replace the condensor when you change a failed compressor for your parts warranty to be valid, and to change the condensor requires you to remove the front bumper. This would have been way too much for me to do on my drive! Rock Auto say you must also change the orifice tube filter, but this is apparently a dash-out job and would have made it too expensive for me to fix.

So the flushing uses a special piece of pressure kit and a solvent flush. The flushing unit attaches to the aircon pipework under the bonnet with the inlet and outlet connected either where the condensor or compressor are fitted. There are pretty detailed instructions (as you would expect from the Americans who are always afraid of litigation!) regarding the flow rate/pressure/time etc. and the solvent is washed through removing any debris from the system as it goes. The system is then reassembled, vacuum checked (removing the air and solvent residues) and then refilled with gas and the correct lubrication. All in all it took a couple of days including the strip down, flush and rebuild and, not including parts, it cost around £400. It was clearly needed though, as a lot of crud came out in the flushing solution and I wouldn't have wanted that to end up in my brand new compressor.

I can't be absolutely certain on the cost of this alone as, during the stripping process, Geoff (the owner who's a very friendly guy) spotted the alternator wasn't new (as the previous owner had told me) and had actually been sandblasted and rebuilt. However, the job had not been done well and most of the grit was still inside the alternator! As a result of this, a lot of dust had made it into the front bearing on the engine and caused damage to this too. He showed me the part and it was pretty badly worn away by the dust. This also explained the other noises coming from the engine (aside from the growl of the dying compressor) So I had the alternator rebuilt again and the idler bearing changed which put the cost up. It was all worth it though as the air con is now almost silent in operation and you can't hear it when driving the car (unlike before when the compressor was louder than the V8!) and there are no grinding noises from the alternator.

The next job is to track down a new alternator though as, when the car starts from cold, all of the lights flicker so the alternator is clearly not putting out the correct voltage. It settles down though once the car warms up. There's always something!