Pete Trasborg
Brand Manager, Jp
In the story “Jeep Fire Prevention” (Oct. ’07), we showed you how to wire relays into your ’99-and-up TJ heater system to help combat the melted switches and wires that can be caused by a worn or dying blower motor. As part of our swapping and wiring, we put a cheapo parts store blower motor in the Jeep and figured we’d be good to go. We got about 7 years and 120,000 miles out of our factory blower motor, but the replacement only lasted 2 years and about 20,000 miles before we were having problems again.
We were cruising along one rainy day with the defroster on and smelled burning electrical parts just after we noticed the blower motor speed decrease. Once you’ve gotten a whiff of the acrid smell of burning electrical parts, you never forget it. So, we knew we weren’t having flashbacks to the time Randy was blamed for that honky tonk burning down. Our hvac system was on the fritz again.
Needless to say, 20,000 miles for an hvac system fix sucks, so we did some more research this time. After examining the old parts in the dash and tapping some companies with experience in this sort of thing, we came up with a plan of attack. There is no reason we shouldn’t see more than 100,000 miles out of this round of repairs, and here’s how we did it.
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