1994 Subaru Legacy, Blower Does Not Work

This 1994 Subaru Legacy came in with the complaint that the blower does not work at all. I checked for power at the fuses and battery power was present. I went to the blower motor and checked for power on the black/red wire and it was not present.

I started looking for the blower relay. It is located above the driver’s side fuse box and is quite difficult to find. So hard that I could not get a picture of it without removing the dash but it is up there.I did luckily notice some heat damage on a connector at the lower right corner of the fuse box.

Now, this car really needs a new fuse box and a harness connector. It is however sixteen years old, with about 180,000 miles on it. Some investigation found that most of the heat damage was done to the female terminal in the connector and that the male terminal in the fuse box looked pretty good. I consulted with the customer and we decided to try a good patch. I found a terminal in my collection, that fit well. I crimped and soldered it to  a piece of 10 gauge wire.

I installed the new wire lead onto the appropriate terminal in the fuse box. Then I cut the corner off of the plastic male connector.

Installed the harness connector around the new lead.

Installed heat shrink tubing and splicing connectors.

Crimped and sealed in place.

Tucked the wire into the harness so that it would be held in place, by the tension and weight of the harnesses.

The fuse that I show in the following picture as well as the matching fuse behind it are for the blower motor and are powered at all times. These two 15 amp fuses supply power to the blower relay, which when activated by the ignition switch sends power out to the blower motor on the black/red wire that was damaged at the fuse box.