Friday, October 20, 2023
The Chariot’s Blower – Part 1
Gather round and listen to my tale of woe.
It’s not quite that bad but I needed an opening sentence to (try to) get your attention.
To operate the heat and AC this car has three old school knobs and two push buttons, no fancy computer or digital anything..
Wires run from the blower speed switch to something called a resistor network, then to the blower. Here’s the short list of things that can go wrong:
- Broken switch
- A wire problem
- An electrical connector problem
- Broken resistor network
- Broken motor
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I disassembled the passenger side console. The first thing I noticed was that the cabin air filter was holding back a bunch of leaves and stuff..
The car is a 2020. The date code in the center of that filter is 101019 (October ‘19). That’s the original cabin air filter, never changed, just completely corked with 3 years and 48 thousand miles of dust, dirt, bugs, and leaves.
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Before I touched the filter I unplugged the old blower and plugged in the new one. Airflow! So the blower was busted.
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I pulled the filter outta there and most of those leaves and twigs fell down into the blower. That mess would come out with the blower.
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The blower is integral to the housing so it must be cut from the housing with a sharp knife, carefully working your way around the perimeter of the blower. Stab, stab, stab. Re-position your body. Stab some more. Repeat until it’s free. The picture to the left shows the end result. Not bad, eh?.
Some folks install a new filter and blower, button everything up and call it good. A few days later the fan stops working again. What happened?
.
Remember that list of parts I mentioned earlier? The fan pulled a lot of extra current through those parts when it was trying to pull air through the plugged filter. That extra current may have overheated something.
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I unplugged the connector for the resistor network. This is what it looked like. That dark discoloration used to be tin plating on the terminals. Those terminals got so hot the tin literally boiled off of the base metal. They’ll never work well again. So a bad connector..
That’s also true for the connector on the resistor network itself. So a bad resistor network.
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Three parts ($480) ruined because someone couldn’t be bothered to replace the cabin air filter ($20) or have a dealer do it for them.
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Stay tuned for part 2.
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