I wanted to take the time to post an update on my experiments fixing the climate control system. My experience after a year and one half is that the system works fairly well in warm weather but pumps out far to much heat, even on the lowest setting, in cold weather. The problem is insufficient airflow over the temperature sensor. The temperature sensor is located right behind the lower dashboard fascia. The port is the pair of horizontal slits in the dash right next to the driver's right knee, just to the left of the radio. To access the sensor you need to remove the lower black panel under the driver's side dashboard, the lower dash panel under the steering wheel column, the shifter boot and cover, the piece of fake wood trim to the left of the shifter and the fascia piece along the forward driver's side of the center console. The sensor itself is inside of a rectangular black housing. Connected to the rear of the housing is a light gray flexible plastic conduit which travels deep up into the dash and connects to the HVAC system. Air is drawn through the conduit and over the sensor by a venturi (i.e. air flow through the system sucks air through the conduit). The problem is insufficient airflow. I met with Sam and bought the parts he uses in his Forrester fix. The link to find Sam is here:
http://www.geocities.com/samiam_68/SubaruCCS/SSC_Fix.htm
The big difference between the Forrester and the LGT is that you cannot simply disconnect the upper end of the conduit and plug it into the fan. The upper end of the LGT conduit is buried way the hell up into the dash where no human can possibly wriggle his hand. My solution was to disconnect the existing conduit at the sensor housing and connect a one foot piece of new flexible plastic conduit to the housing, route the conduit to a location just to the left and below the steering column and locate the fan there. The fan is mounted to a metal piece of the inner dashboard structure which detaches by removal of two screws.
Once re-assembled the system works beatifully but I found the fan noisey. After living with the fix for the past month I removed it two days ago to see if I could find a solution for the noise. I have been corresponding with Sam and he suggests perhaps a quieter fan with a lower cfm rating. The assembly which Sam supplied me with uses a Sunon KDE1204PFVX which is rated at cfm 8.6. My thoughts are either a less aggressive fan or maybe the addition of volume control, rheostat or potentiometer (you have to cut me some slack here since I'm not well versed in electronics). I rather prefer this since it gives you the option of controlling the fan speed. I'm just not sure yet where I will locate the control.
In the meantime I drove the car this morning and as I was waiting for the sensor to come up to temperature I had an idea. I turned the fan on high. This is somewhat counter-intuitive. If you are sitting in an uncomfortably hot car the last thing you want to do is blast the fan on high. But it worked, within five minutes the sensor regulated the heat to a comfortable level. It worked because I increased airflow over the sensor. As soon as the sensor came up to temperature the system immediately switched from footlevel airflow to bi-level airflow and at that point I simply hit the auto button, the fan speed lowered and the system maintained a comfortable level.
Now mind you, I still intend to pursue re-installing the fan with a fan speed control to make the system work automatically as it was intended to. But for those of you unwilling to go through the time and effort of installing the fan I suggest you try cranking up the fan when you first jump in the car in the morning and leaving it there until the bi-level kicks in. If I get this all sorted out I will try to post some pictures.