heater blower sometimes doesn't work

[KieranM]

Hi,

So firstly I'm driving to France a week today.

Secondly everything seems fine, aside from the internal blower. My car does not have A/C FYI.

The symptoms are that sometimes I start up, the blower works straight away. Sometimes it doesn't, but then kicks in either a few seconds, minutes, or at longest nearly half an hour.

The only clue I have is that my neighbour opened and shut my passenger door and the blower kicked into life! Not sure what bearing that has.

A scan with VCDS lite has come up with nothing other than the usual.

Are any of the wires on the passenger footwell loom anything to do with it?

Any ideas/solutions gratefully appreciated!

Thanks,

Kieran

[Crasher]

The brushes in the fan are worn out, thump the bottom of the heater box behind the glovebox and it will come on. You can either get a new fan from GSF which is easy to fit (glovebox out) or you can buy some brushes off fleaBay and prat about fitting them, your choice.

[vwcabriolet1971]

Had similar problem with '99 MK4 Golf GTTDI (110bhp) - turned out be a loose input terminal in the motor housing connector . Would run perfectly if connector was biased one way. Fixed with scrap yard replacement.

[KieranM]

Ah cheers for that, I've ordered a replacement from GSF, hopefully they deliver quickly, as I'm driving to Morzine on Friday. Thanks for the replies. The smacking it under the glove box trick fires it into life in the meantime

[neil1052]

Thought my blower motor had failed a while back too....
i could only feel the motor blast when on demist....a totally blocked pollen filter certainly didn't help

[KieranM]

So an update on this one....

The motor arrived, it was the wrong shape! So I went to the scrappy with a day to go, whilst taking mine out I noticed the component that controls the speeds was rusted beyond belief, I replaced it with one from a Golf that fit, just about, and it works fine now.

The car was awesome on the holiday, unbelievably economical (a good 58 mpg) on the French motorways. The only thing that did happen was there seems to be moisture coming in from the pollen filter again, damn it!

All in all not bad for the 166k miles it has done.

[Crasher]

You have water entering the heater intake, either from blocked plenum drains filling up the plenum chamber or the water deflector trim below the screen is allowing water to drip onto the intake.

[vwcabriolet1971]

Make sure you check the motor connector if using a "scrappy" motor as some of the motor connectors are different. I used a motor with different connector - easily fixed by chopping of the old main harness connector and soldering in new motor connector from donor car. Good fix for £20 ! I was lucky that the motor speed resistor pack once cleaned of all the green muck worked perfectly.