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Car Forum / Driving, Maintenance, Tuning / Maintenance and Repair / October 2005

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Blower resistor on Dodge

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HLS@nospam.nix - 02 Oct 2005 20:17 GMT
I just had the second blower voltage divider fail on my van, and thought I
would post about
this.

This divider provides the multiple fan speeds, and is installed in the air
conditioner intake
plenum.

When I first bought the car, the connector had burned through, and the
resistor was damaged.

So, I cobbled up an ersatz connector (new pigtail apparently not available
from Chrysler) and
installed a new resistor.

This one lasted a couple of years.  The connector survived. When I removed
the divider,
I found that there were three nichrome coil resistors and one little ceramic
unit.  The ceramic
unit (about 0.1 ohm resistance) apparently functions much like a fusable
link, and mine was
open.

I cut the thing out of the circuit, soldered a 20 amp fuseholder across the
terminals (and
outside the plenum), and put it back in service.

It works fine.  I can , if I have another problem, just replace the fuse.
This will soon tell me
if the current to the blower motor is spiking and causing the ceramics to
fail. It might be hard
to find otherwise as it is probably intermittent.

I have an extra factory resistor, and when I am satisfied that all the
kinks are out of the system,
I will return everything to OEM, maybe.  This seems to be a weakness with
certain Dodges.

It may require a blower motor to fix it.  Oddly, a motor from the dealership
is $33.  From NAPA
or Autozone, it is considerably more expensive.

Just thought this might help someone down the line.
tim bur - 03 Oct 2005 00:13 GMT
it's a fuse typedevice like u stated but it also prevents a backffed on the
ground side of the circuit

> I just had the second blower voltage divider fail on my van, and thought I
> would post about
[quoted text clipped - 39 lines]
>
> Just thought this might help someone down the line.
Professor - 03 Oct 2005 01:53 GMT
If the resistor pack doesn't last... you either have a blower motor
that drawing too much current... or there is insufficient airflow over
the resistor pack... or both.

Professor
www.telstar-electronics.com
HLS@nospam.nix - 03 Oct 2005 12:11 GMT
> If the resistor pack doesn't last... you either have a blower motor
> that drawing too much current... or there is insufficient airflow over
> the resistor pack... or both.
>
> Professor
> www.telstar-electronics.com

I suspect the blower motor.  It has never blown a fuse while operating at
full speed however.

Fusible resistors sometimes just 'relax', from vibration, age, whatever.

These Dodge models seem to have a problem with this setup.  When I
first experienced the problem, I couldn't get the burned connector pigtail
from Dodge, so went to the junkyards.  Never found a connector there as
they were all scavenged.  This lead me to believe that something wasn't
quite right with this setup.

I noticed this resistor pack is not soldered internally, but rather is
crimped together.  Not an unusual construction technique where heat
is expected, but the terminals were not necessarily still tight in the crimp
either.  That can be a source of problems.

I can monitor the current drain through this resistor pack now by
measuring the voltage across it.   Knowing that the total pack resistance
is about 2.2 ohms, it's easy to measure as a function of voltage.

I wanted to dig into this installation and find out what makes it stop
ticking.
 
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