Kernel process going mad. Possible cause is a sensor. Help locating?

Hello all,

First things first. My MBP had been working silky smooth until last week when I woke it up only to witness strange crawling speed seen never before. Kernel process consuming 300-700% of cpu.

I’ve isolated the cause after lots of painstaking research and the cause looks like a faulty sensor. I’ve also decoded it and it’s pointing to an ambient air sensor (as the hardware test says).

4SNS/1/C0000008: TAOP—124

I would like to know the location of this sensor so I can check if it’s come loose. There should be no reason why it should be failing since my MacBook has been used in very carefully and it’s almost new condition.

As additional information, I actually had this MacBook sent to an authorised Apple service centre. Some sensors were coming out to be faulty and it seemed they had fixed it. I tested the MacBook and it was indeed working just fine, until again today evening when suddenly the laptop again started to get back to crawling speeds. Now I know what the exact cause is but can anyone please help me in finding this sensor? I think I can fix this myself.

Btw, there is a difference on how the laptop worked when I had brought it for repairs and how it’s working right now. Earlier, the cpu was at full load since startup and there was absolutely no respite. This time though, it works fine but is getting occasional cpu load spikes. I think the engineer missed this little sensor and I’m in no mood to have the board replaced just because of this small thing.

Update

Just opened the MacBook and did some cleaning. I thought dust could be one reason so I did some light brushing. Unfortunately, the problem still exists :(

In fact, in trying to clean up the dust I accidentally cut the camera cable and now I have a notebook without the working camera :((

Update

So I actually decided to do a SMC reset after the cleaning process and what I observe are some positive results. Laptop has been running for like 2 hours now for testing purpose and I'm observing 99% normal activity. However, I did get a brief slowdown when I started browsing a website. It again went back to normal. Kernel process taking up only 2% of cpu as of this update.