Heated Cloth Seats

I finished a heated seat installation in my 2008 under the cloth seats and it wasn't as difficult as I expected. I was able to somewhat follow the lessons learned of Darreldd from evnut although the heated seat kit was a little different. I chose to use the Dorman 628-040 Universal Heated Seat kits.

The switches are on the center console. The ground wire is under the center console and power ran under the seat to the side rail and to the fusebox over the parking brake.

The biggest problems I had were the following...

My add-a-fuse block didn't pass voltage no matter which way it was flipped. Ended up playing around with fuses in the empty blocks and eventually got continuity and it started working.

Pulled the battery ground before starting the job because of the unknown about disconnecting the passenger airbags under the seats. SOMEONE shut the hatch on me while no battery was present!

This large man had to make the choice between fiddling with the emergency release that I couldn't find, or just going through contortions hooking up the battery negative to chassis while laying in the backseat... Contortions it was. What a sight!

I'd recommend everyone at least become familiar with the location of the manual hatch release and how to use it. That was something I didn't prepare for on this job, and it really cost me some time.

The seats perform well on low heat and are almost too warm on high heat. I'm looking forward to the next cold snap to minimize HVAC use a little more, of course spring would be nice too! I'm curious if I'll be able to use high a little more in sub 20 degree temperatures.

 

It took me about 6 hours to do the install, but that probably should have been done in about 2 hours per seat. I pulled the seats and took them inside, since they needed to be flipped every which way to remove seat fabric attachments, etc. It wasn't as bad as I expected, though.

The kit recommends a 10 amp fuse per seat, so you'd expect a max power of 120 watts per, but I'd bet that it's somewhere around half that. There's no specification on their instructions, website, or packaging for that matter. I didn't tong the circuit, but I could if it helps. I heard others run both seats off one 16 gauge 10 amp wire, but I didn't take that chance.

I'm only a hundred miles into the modification, but I never would have waited so long if I thought it was possible.