01 Prius Blower Motor replacment

I described it for you on November 10th in this post.

-Chap

 

Really, I think you're making this hard for yourself. Is Google the only place to look? Does the $15 charge really mean you utterly refuse to look on techinfo.toyota.com? Doesn't that sound like a place to look if you're fixing a Toyota? Honestly, everything you're asking is answered there, right in the manual where I said it is....

-Chap

 

Good luck with your fan replacement. I may be looking at the same procedure as my fan stopped working suddenly as well.

 

Chap has provided substantial help to many Classic Prius owners with specific technical issues in the past. When he occasionally refers a member to techinfo.toyota.com, that is usually because the procedure is sufficiently complex (or perhaps he was tired of having to explain all of the necessary detail).

From time to time, I also will refer members with questions to techinfo because I feel that the individual should fully understand what s/he is getting into before starting a more complex project.

It surprises me that some people prefer to perform a repair job, lacking full knowledge of the correct procedure - and potentially waste hours of their time - instead of paying $15 for two-business day access to the official factory repair manual info. For example, removing/replacing a transaxle - then having a problem (which could have been avoided with full advance knowledge) and needing to repeat all of that labor.

But it takes all kinds, I guess. Good luck with your repair.

 

Yeah, I missed the thread that he had linked to before responding, so I edited the post. Back to searching for a solution to my own issue

 

Thanks, Patrick, for the kind words. Adam, do you mind if I take up this question, just because I have been thinking about it and I think it's interesting?

My first, don't-stop-to-think-about-it-answer would be no, that's not the only reason or the best reason for coming to forums. When I do stop to think about it, I can see it might reflect a slow change that's been taking place on PriusChat.

I am not one of the real PriusChat old-timers. I joined in 2008, so I've been here about half the group's life.

Around the time I joined, there was a pretty strong sense that a lot of the PriusChatters, at least the ones who were around the most, had the manuals, or techinfo access, and came to the forums for assistance in specific areas beyond what could just be looked up. Or to make sense of something that wasn't clear there, or to speculate on what it implied about how the car worked. That is, there was a feeling like, we have a certain common base of information we can work from, we can talk about it without losing each other, and we can use each other's time and expertise on the forum for working out problems and diagnoses that are puzzling.

And I think part of what's been happening since is a demographic change on PriusChat. The real old-timers, the ones who bought their Gen 1 Prii new, were hardcore early tech adopters; they were spending real money on these cars, which all the pundits were sure would be stuck on the side of the road twice a month from complicated tech failures and need a kajillion-dollar battery before year 5. Between the up-front price of the car and the anticipated risk of really expensive upkeep, this was a group highly motivated to have the best repair information available, and the cost (even for the paper volumes at around $250) was a small fraction of the investment at risk, and a real no-brainer.

I was not in that first wave of early adopters, but when I came around in 2008 I was part of the next sort of wave of risk takers, the first folks taking a chance on out-of-warranty, > 100,000 mile used first-gen cars. We spent less up front on the car itself (still not far from $10k though), but were looking at all that expensive tech now with no warranty for comfort, no Dorman remanufactured battery yet, and still rumors about how many thousands the Toyota battery would cost. Still a total no-brainer to spend $250 on the manuals (or, wonder of wonders, newfangled online access for $15!) just to be well prepared for taking care of that investment.

Fast forward to the last few years, and a bunch of the old-timer early adopters have moved on to newer cars and aren't around this forum as much. People who buy new Prii aren't pioneering tech adopters any more; the car has proven not only to not poop out on the side of the road twice a month but to be the most reliable car you can buy, and is selling to the whole broad car-buying population, many of whom aren't interested in technically understanding their cars. Gen 1s are old cheap used cars now, and new Gen 1 PriusChatters don't have the same financial skin in the game as incentive to be well prepared to take care of them.

And it seems to be in these same last few years that the kinds of questions on the forum have been changing. There are still plenty of interesting ones where somebody is having an issue that takes careful thinking to puzzle out, or where the service information only gives some hints and the rest needs to be pieced together. Those are still the most fun PriusChat threads, and the ones it feels most useful to participate in. But at the same time a growing number of threads do seem to be looking for nothing more than information that's right in the manual, but for someone else to look it up and retype it.

I'm not sure the financial story I just gave completely explains that ... I haven't recently checked what Gen 1s are currently selling for, but even now I really doubt that $15 is a prohibitively large fraction of the investment that it could help preserve. (Also, I wonder if people forget the time-is-money value that everyone benefits from on this forum; the time of everybody who reads and pays attention to a thread, plus everybody who takes the time to compose responses to it, waay exceeds $15; it seems considerate to use that resource thoughtfully, and in the more valuable ways, like for troubleshooting a weird problem.)

But I guess another change taking place over these same recent years is what I've heard some of my librarian friends talking about: it's so easy now to look stuff up in Google and Wikipedia that the librarians are seeing waves of (generally younger) people who actually think that's what research is. The thing is, in a lot of topic areas (this really is everywhere, my librarian friends aren't usually talking about cars), there is some very important source or sources that everyone in that field knows to go to. They are not always online, or free, or indexed by Google, but it's just nuts to leave them out of a search. And then the puzzle is, how to politely answer the person who comes to the reference desk saying "I've searched everywhere, I even clicked through 20 pages of Google hits, and I totally couldn't find this information on this topic" ... when the answer has to be (as politely as possible), "hmm, so you mean you've searched everywhere minus the one place you had to know you could find that." And occasionally that seems to happen in this forum too.

I'm sure I'll never talk everyone into making use of the manuals, but I'm pretty sure those who try will find that they are pretty well written, chock full of good information, and not at all overpriced in view of the time and money to be saved. For anybody planning to keep the car for a while, the first time referring to them won't be the last....

-Chap

 

PC member BentSpace back in 2011 had a fan-intermittent-then-fan-totally-out issue in a 2002, that turned out to involve the electrical connector to the fan. Might be worth a quick check, as I don't think you need to dismantle anything to get there.

-Chap

 

As long as I drive an NHW11, I'll hang in this forum and monitor Prius Technical Stuff. I also drive a ZVW30 and hang in those forums. But I avoid NHW20, Prius c, and Prius v because I don't have a 'test article.' If I can't walk out and run the test, I just as soon leave the other vehicle forums alone.

Eventually our NHW11 will have an 'end of life' failure. For example the 'brake' light seems to flash more often in cold weather although I can not find a hard code. Just I don't have the time and energy to make repairs that cost more, much more, than the vehicle and are likely to just mean extending the remaining, short life to the next major failure. There comes a time when a machine needs to be recycled. But we don't need to toss them out for trivial repairs.

So I like the challenge and continue to experiment with both Prius. I have a modified jack in progress for the ZVW30 and a new plan for the 1.5 kW inverter. The NHW11 is supporting dash cam lens and placement experiments.

Bob Wilson

 

Hi Chap,

This is so true. However, it is also true that the PC forums do not have posted rules which require a new member to perform due diligence prior to posing a question.

So (using an analogy) we have some newcomers asking how to read the hands of an analog clock, while some of the PC regulars enjoy discussing the features and benefits of the latest rubidium, GPS-based, and cesium frequency standards, their relative costs, issues involved in maintenance, etc.

When I am not interested in a particular query, I ignore it. Usually another PC member, more patient than I, will answer.

Hi Bob,

This is why I avoid the G3 forums - I don't own that model. If I don't possess first-hand knowledge about a technical subject, I attempt to refrain from offering a written opinion.

 

The blower motor is easy to swap and is the same motor as Gen2. There's a lot more Gen2's in junkyards so cheap/easy to find salvage motor it you need it.

 

Thanks for the followup! Maybe somewhere there should be a sticky for repair procedures known to be easier than Toyota said in the shop manual. So far we know (at least) you can change injectors without disturbing the valve cover, you can replace the brake accumulator without evacuating the A/C, and now, thanks to you, we can change the blower motor without removing the instrument panel or cutting the brace.

-Chap