Picture – if you will – being forced into the purgatory of not having an air conditioner in your car. Maybe the air conditioner worked yesterday or it worked fine last year, but didn’t quite make it through the winter. But now it’s 90 degrees, you’re miserable and there’s no temperate breeze issuing forth from your car’s vents to cool your restless brow. What are you to do?

First, don’t panic. Assess what’s actually happening with your car. Is the fan blowing air, but the air isn’t cool? This means that the fan is working, but there’s a problem with either the compressor or the coolant. In this case, you’d better hope it’s the coolant. Fortunately, this is the most common problem with car air conditioning systems, and the easiest thing to fix.

However, the process of adding coolant is more complex than it was 15 years ago, as steps have been added to ensure that the coolant doesn’t escape to harm the environment. You can find a shop with the necessary tools and experience with a simple phone call or Internet search. The process usually doesn’t take very long – less than an hour – and usually around $50 or less.

Or, perhaps the problem is that your vents seem to be issuing forth cold air, but it doesn’t seem to spread out to fill the car. This could be a problem with your fan. Fan problems can be either ridiculously simple or ridiculously expensive. On the ridiculously simple hand, a fuse needs replacing, and you’re looking at less than $5 and five minutes. In fact, finding the right fuse and your car’s fuse box may take longer than buying and installing the fuse.

On the ridiculously expensive hand, the fan itself may have mechanical defects, meaning that it will need to be replaced. The cost of this repair depends on the expense of the part, how accessible the fan is, and how the fan interfaces with the rest of the air conditioning system. You could spend from $75 to $300 depending on your car and how your fan is configured.

Finally, you may have air blowing that’s not cold and you’ve been told that you have plenty of coolant. Or maybe the air feels cool when you start driving, but gets less cool as you continue to drive. Both of these problems can be caused by a faulty compressor. If there’s a worst case scenario for car air conditioning problems, this is it.

Here’s a dirty little secret of the auto industry – cars aren’t designed for air conditioning. The physics of air conditioning really doesn’t lend itself to being conveniently installed in the relatively small space it’s allotted under the hood of a car. Air compressors are always hard to get to – in some cases; you have to remove the entire dashboard to get to the compressor. Air compressors are expensive, and since you’re opening the air conditioning system, you again need someone who can handle the possible loss of coolant into the atmosphere.

Air conditioning problems can be simple or complex, and reasonably priced or outrageously expensive. A quick visit to your mechanic can usually help you determine what the problem is. Whether or not fixing the problem is something you want to do is something only you can decide with all the facts in hand.