Need help! blower fan not working

Last year, my heater began operating intermittently. On one extremely cold day, I thought it had completely "broken" and was so thrilled and surprised to have it blast on after driving over a speed breaker. For a year, any type of sturdy jolt to the whole car would fix the problem. I'm not getting away with that any longer. This problem began shortly after I gave my daughter's car a jump, so I assumed I must have knocked something around trying to hook up battery cables. I changed the cabin filter and I manually started the blower a couple of times.....but nothing is working anymore. Does anyone have any suggestions for where I should begin to troubleshoot this situation?

 

No troubleshooting is required; the blower motor needs to be replaced based upon your description of the problem.

 

The part took me 10 minutes to pull off a junkyard car, just a couple of screws underneath the unit which resides behind the glove box. Lots of help on the internet on how to do it. Bad bushings on the motor is the cause, seen it a hundred times on all types of D.C. (Direct Current) motors from Starters to little laptop fans.

 

I just bought a 2006 toyota prius and afterward noticed the blower fan being noisey. I am glad to find this thread. A friend said she would help me replace the blower fan.

 

This worked! Saved me hundreds of dollars at the dealership! Thanks so much for all the details and pictures. Why be a princess or damsel in distress when you can fix it yourself!! You rock!!

 

I have a 2002 Prius and my AC/heater Fan stopped functioning. Car guy told me the fans were not built to be replaced - he would have to cut it out, weld on a support bar and then replace??? Ever heard of this??? Is it a scam?

 

Here is a video of blower motor for tercel 2003-08, pretty similar with prius.

 

I have a 2010 Toyota Prius. I turned my A/C and rolled down my windows to get some fresh air, when I tried to turn it on again it wouldn't blow out air. No matter the setting -hot/cold, low/high, front/back/feet-nothing. My dad did some testing. He tested some fuses-they're good. He also tested the voltage to the blower motor, and it wasn't the hookup-it was getting plenty of voltage from the car. We're not sure, though, if it's the blower motor itself or if it's the blower motor resistor...... and some places I've read that that the 2010 Prius doesn't even have that. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

Start with the blower motor

 

Blower in my 2009 Gen 2 has been doing the "no startup" thing. For a while I could count on being able to slap it on the bottom, below the dash, and it would start. Not so much anymore. Pulled it out this weekend. Local stores didn't have a new one in stock, and I didn't feel like tearing into the motor itself, since my fan blade seemed to be a bit stubborn about coming off (shaft was a bit rusty). I removed the 2 screws from the back of the motor housing. Sprayed some WD-40 in there, a couple of shots into each of the 2 holes, one deep, one just inside the hole. Spun the blade by hand and tilted the unit around in all different directions to hopefully get the WD-40 spread around to wherever it might do some good, as I couldn't see inside, of course. Plugged it back in and it starts right up now. It seems to run smoother than ever. Maybe something else would have been better than WD-40, but it's what I had in my garage at the time. We'll see if this fix lasts. If it doesn't, I'll just order a new blower off of eBay. I looked back on this thread and saw where I replaced the motor in my 2008 Gen 2 nearly 7 years ago, at 195K miles. This one (the 2009) is at 172K, fairly close to the same mileage -- interesting.

 

Hello, how is it working since then? Mine just started to malfunction. Sometimes it works, sometimes not... But it sounds that it has difficulties with spinning up, even after that. Also, do you have an url or type number for replacement fan?

 

This is a funny thread - it's in the Gen 2 forum, but reading through it, it has had questions asked about the blower in every generation from Gen 1 to Gen 3. Taking a few random bits in order:

Might have meant to say 'brushes' and got autocorrected. Most DC motors have carbon brushes that carry the power to contacts on the spinning rotor. Springs hold them against the contacts, but eventually they wear too short to make good contact, and then you have this intermittent/hard-to-start business.

Not everybody knows that the friendly neighborhood hardware store probably has a box with a bunch of different size motor brushes. Of course the odds are slim of finding anything the right size for a specialty motor like this, and some motors aren't easy to open up for brush replacement anyway. But for more common things like power tools, finding the right-sized brushes down at the hardware store can be a cheap fix.

Another fun thing that can happen with brush-commutated motors is that the carbon dust that wears off the brushes can get packed into the spaces between the commutator contacts, until it conducts electricity all the way across, making a short circuit between the two brushes. The motor then makes the car's blower fuse blow. But it can be like roulette, and only happen when the fan came to stop in a particular position.

Gen 3 models with the solar vent option have a brushless blower motor.

Yes, Gen 1 has difficult access to the blower housing; in case you need to remove it with less work than taking the whole dash out, they molded cut lines into the horizontal brace under the glove box. It's plastic. If you remove it by cutting at the two lines, you can get the blower housing in and out through that space. It also has screw holes molded in next to the cut marks. The dealer sells a little metal bar with screw holes that match, to replace the plastic bit that was cut out. No big deal. No welding.

But that's for getting the whole blower housing out. Just changing the blower motor isn't that much work, if you can deal with the cramped access to the screws underneath.

No Prius has a blower motor resistor, but there is a small box of electronics (a "blower motor linear controller") that generally mounts in the air duct near the blower, the same way an old-school blower resistor would, and yeah, some people still call it that. The repair manual (more info) has ideas for how to tell whether a problem is in the motor or the controller.

There's a nice writeup by hobbit about the controller in the Gen 2, with pictures.

Lastly, don't forget to look at all the electrical connectors (from the wire harness plugged into the controller, and from the controller output to the blower motor input). There was a thread here years ago (I doubt I could find it) with pictures of one of those connectors, clearly scorched. That gets fixed by replacing the damaged terminal with a repair terminal from the dealer. Cheap fix when that turns out to be the problem.

 

Thank you. Do you, by any chance know the sku number, or one URL for the exact part? P2

 

God Bless You, Prius chat! Hoping to coax my 2006 through the summer, the fan blower wouldn't work this morning and Prius Chat helped get to the problem without freaking out. The "kick the box" approach is working for now, with a clean cabin air filter above. Will clean it up further and then consider ordering a replacement, looks like OEM 8710347050. Lots of good advice about doing the work here and I see there's a ton of YouTube videos, too. Can't do much without a fan or AC this June in Texas. Thank you, posters, thank you, thank you.