Climate Control Computer needed for 355

You talking about the ecu that sits up in the front bonnet?

 

Enzo
I live in San Diego also and have used 355 parts. Send me a picture of the item your describing or the part number.

Cheers
Rick

 

Mine was bad, too. Not quite $2000 to replace, but definitely $1600. Good news is if you can find a used one will probably be half that. Bad news is very difficult to find used ones. When my mechanic told me the diagnosis, like yours after temporarily swapping it with another ECU, he told me he saw some corrosion on the ECU, and that this is the sort of thing that might get a bit wet when a hose is taken to the car frequently, as in weekly washes, automated car washes, etc. Per his advice, I now do most of my car cleaning with spray bottle stuff (Griotts Speed Shine is great), and save the water washes for that rare occasion when the car gets truly dirty. FWIW, my front hood seals appear intact, so I don't know exactly how water got to the ECU. Anyway, good luck locating a used ECU, but even if you have to pay for a new one, it will be worth it once the weather gets hot enough. The swap of the ECU's, by the way, can be done in your garage at home in 20 minutes with simple hand tools.

John

 

If you are convinced that your old unit is bad such that you are about to throw it away, you can easily remove the circuit boards inside. With the circuit boards removed, wrap them inside airtight ziplock baggies and freeze them for several hours in your fridge.

Six hours in your freezer should give you about 30 minutes to reinstall them and test them in your car while frozen. If they work while frozen, it typically means that a chip on a circuit board is going bad (chip errors manifest first with heat, whereas keeping a chip very cold can cause an error to remain uneventful).

If they don't work while frozen, it usually means that you have a fried soldering connection (can sometimes be seen as a little brown spot on the circuit board) or a failed component such as a resistor, capacitor, etc.

Anyway, if the freezing trick works, you can then narrow down the problem to a single circuit board by only freezing one board at a time and re-testing while frozen.

You'll probably find more than a few companies that will repair such boards if you don't want to replace chips or resolder connections yourself (estimate ~~$300 to $500 for a quality repair). Google ECU repair if you like, for instance.