Citroen XM Forum

thanks for your replies...will look into that doseur valve change....it just got bloody cold and the heater problem is the main priority now! the digital heater display is gone so i cant make out what its saying, so i just put the heat up to full and the fan on about a third up....when i do this a small amount of warm air blows out of the vents on either side of the steering wheel, but cold air blows in at my feet....apart from investing in thermal socks, anyone got an idea what i can do to solve this?

The a/c control panel is only held in place by spring clips.
Lever gently with a thin wide blade on the bottom edge to unclip.
The temperature display has its own dash bulb, centre one.
Take the overhead light down and clean the car temperature sensor of dust and muck.
Unclip the light cover to get at the 4 holding screws.
Temp sensor is the long tube with miniture fan.
After that you are looking at failed actuators on the heater box.

John

Welcome to the fold. How easy is it going to be to maintain an XM in Ireland? As an experiment I asked a "Citroen Specialist" in Harold´s Cross, Dublin, if he had any experience with XM´s. He asked me did I mean SM and then had a bit of difficulty remembering which car the XM was. So, no sir, you don´t see XMs so often, do you? How is your XM managing the bumpy and potholed roads? Is suspension coping?
General question: how do you fix a matrix display? I read about this in Citroenian: you disassemble it and do something (or indeed other) with the layers and stick it all back together. Sounds a bit uncertain to me.

Richard

I think you'd find much the same reaction at any garage nowadays Richard. XMs are rare indeed. My MOT tester knows them well as he used to have one years ago but he's very much the exception...

But who cares - with this forum most jobs can be tackled at home with great confidence. At the heart of it the XM is not averse to being fixed and generally it's not tat difficult once you know the tricks.

casalingua wrote: General question: how do you fix a matrix display? I read about this in Citroenian: you disassemble it and do something (or indeed other) with the layers and stick it all back together. Sounds a bit uncertain to me.

Yep, that sounds about right I think there's a self-help file on this isn't there?

It´s that the garage was self-labelled as a Citroen specialist. At the very least one might expect a reply like this "XM? Ah, yes, the CX replacement. We don´t see many of those, I am afraid but if you want we can do our best....et cetera". The man´s actual reply showed a strange level of ignorance. I´d have thought he would at least have heard of the car or shown more active recognition.
"Atlas Ford Specialists, how can I help? ....You want to have a what serviced? A Scorpio...? Hang on...Geoff do you know about a ...what was it...Scorpio? ....Geoff: man here has a Scorpio wants servicing....d'you know anything about those?...."

No, my MOT man is just an old-school back-street garage of the kind you rarely see these days. He specialises in nothing and works out of a collection of ramshackle sheds in what used to once be a corner of the old Newport Pagnell Aston Martin factory.

He's never short of work and as a bonus he's just at the other end of the road where I live.

I reckon he knows a bit about every car and van made since about 1960. He does quite a lot of the older stuff and other local MOT stations take oldies to him when they're not sure if something is dodgy or not - kingpins for instance...

HAve any of you ever experienced a loud rumbling, as if the car is about to take off, when idling in traffic or going slowly? i thought it might be the fan kicking in but it's really loud and really does feel like a plane about to take off! thanks again!

Sorry, no I haven't apart from the engine idling away. I know from experience if the idle setting gets knocked out it can feel a little rough, but not like what you are describing. It's not the interior fan?

it's not all the time, just at the end of my journey, pulling into traffic or just coming into my driveway,
it stops completely if I change gears from Drive to Park ....
is a bit worrying as it shakes the whole car

That sounds like the idle might be a bit low and an engine mount might be rather tired.