This 2009 Dodge Journey came in with the complaint that the blower motor does not work. The customer stated that the blower motor and blower resistor had been replaced and the other shop told them it must be an electrical problem. Imagine that!
The blower is located under the passenger side of the dash and of course the hush panel needs to be removed in order to access it. There are two push pin retainers that hold the leading edge of the panel to the dash.
The business side of the push pin retainer.
I checked for power on the dark blue wire with the ignition on. No power. I looked at the wiring diagrams and found that the power for the blower motor comes directly from the underhood fuse block. No specific fuses were listed for it so jst to be safe I checked all of them. No problem was found. Since this vehicle has 260,000 miles on it and the customer was in a hurry, he asked if I could just run switched power to the motor.
I looked under the driver’s side of the dash to see if there were any practical ways to run power through the fire wall area when I saw something a little out of place. There was a large dark blue wire at a multi pin connector that had some discoloration on the insulation.
Turning the connector around I could definitely see a problem.
Looking at the near side of the connector body I could only see a large black wire. It seemed to correspond to the same location as the blue wire at the back of the connector body.
I opened the harness up by removing some of the tape. It is kind of strange how the wire turned color. To the left of my thumb the wire is dark blue in color. Directly above my thumb the wire is light blue and to the right it is black.
Although not entirely necessary, I found it a little easier to work by removing the knee panel….
…. and the steel panel behind it. All held in place by screws with 10 mm heads. There were also a few spring clips around the edges of the plastic panel.
Being able to see through that opening allowed me to complete the repair without having to get twisted up under the dash.
Cut the old wire out and spliced in a new piece of 12 gauge wire.
I sealed and protected the splices with heat shrink tubing. Note that I ran the wire around the harness connector. Trying to disconnect that harness connector could result in more damage to the plastic body. I wanted to avoid more problems.
I was going to just trim the old wire off close to the plastic connector body and found that the wire and terminal would pull out fairly easy. I repeated removing the wire from the other half.
Although there was plastic clip that was holding the connector to a metal bracket, it was not very secure and it was leaning down very close to the carpet edge. I could see wear at the upper edge of the carpet where the driver’s foot tends to rest. I secured it with a wire tie strap and advised the customer to try and keep his left foot from resting in that location.
Power was now present on the blue wire at the blower motor harness connector with the ignition on.
Both halves of the burnt wire that was removed and bypassed.
