'93 ford explorer heating issues

[myslyn]

Hi. I'm new to this forum but I have read your posts before, however, I need to ask a specific question that I hope to get an answer to.

I have a '93 ford explorer, over 200k miles, runs well but the heater blower stopped working two days ago. the blower motor was replaced a year ago, and things seemed to work fine but now it has just stopped.

Not sure where to go from here. We bought the Haynes repair manual for this car but those books don't help troubleshoot very well...:-(

any help would be greatly appreciated...

 

[winsorcoke]

Take a couple wires and go from the blower right to the battery. If the fan comes on then you'll know the blower is good. If it does come on, it could be a fuse, or the blower resistor pack. Check the blower first and go from there.

 

[myslyn]

more information on situation...

today, we took the truck to the mechanic who spent an 1 1/2 hours only to replace the blower motor relay for a total of $58.00. Ok, ok...we let it go but later today, the heat went out again. We called him back and he started talking about tracing wires because something else is blowing out the motor. He did vaguely mention something about the resistor pack...what is this and can we replace it ourselves?

It is getting critical 'cause we're supposed to be down to 16 degrees tomorrow and with no heat, the car drive won't be a happy one...

Thanks for the info, Mike. I read a post on putting in the A/C relay just to get the heat going and it worked but it won't for long. We only had the heat on twice before it blew out...so, I hope someone can point us in the right direction soon.

We really want to become experts with our vehicle; it hurt me to take it to the shop today but it was going to get cold, and we thought they would FIX it! Grrr!

 

[DeRocha]

What exactly is blowing out???

The resistor pack is used to step down power to the blower to give you different speeds. It contains filaments like in a 3 way light bulb which can burn out over time causing the lose of various speeds.. It is very common to have people indicate the blower only works on High speed. This is because full power is sent directly to the blower by-passing the resistor pack.

 

[myslyn]

'93 explorer heater issues

What exactly is blowing out???

The resistor pack is used to step down power to the blower to give you different speeds. It contains filaments like in a 3 way light bulb which can burn out over time causing the lose of various speeds.. It is very common to have people indicate the blower only works on High speed. This is because full power is sent directly to the blower by-passing the resistor pack.

well, the heat blows out fine when it works. something keeps "blowing" the blower motor relay in the distribution box. we swapped out the A/C relay and it worked for today but somethings causing it to short out and that's what we now know is the real issue.

I'm not taking it back to the shop so they can dick around for nothing again...I just hope someone here has had the same type of issue with their explorer and can point me the right way...