1. Home
  2. Saturn Cars Forum
  3. '01 lw300 electrical problems

'01 lw300 electrical problems

I have had a few intermittent problems with the electrical system in my 2001 LW300. First the rear dome light stopped working and then the HVAC blower started getting flaky. Comes down to poor electrical connections.

The rear cargo light traced back to a bad connection on the diode in the left side inside fuse panel. Took the diode out and put it back - the light worked.

The blower motor problem was a burned connector (black 12 cavity hvac intermediate) located behind the radio. Four cavities were so burned that they were almost shorting to adjacent connections.

Before I start ranting to Saturn (and trying to repair the connectors myself), does anybody know if this is covered by any recall?

Looks to me that the contact materials oxidized and developed a resistance that heated up. It's also a bit strange to put a 40 amp fuse in the under-hood fuse panel for this circuit and then distribute the power with some fairly under-sized connections. (I am an electrical engineer)

Thanks for any input Oppie

Reply to
Oppie
Loading thread data ...

Checked today with a friend who has Alldata service. There is nothing mentioned about a recall or anything specific to this problem. The advice was since it is an inline harness, cut the wires from the burned plugs and hard splice them. The likelihood of needing to remove that harness is practically zero and trying to get replacement plugs is not worth the trouble. Oppie

Reply to
Oppie

All fixed now. One weird thing was that there was a jumper shown on the receptacle side. I was just going to ignore the jumper (one less connection to solder) but had second thoughts. If the jumper would have been only a few inches, I would have left it out but this one went out into a big harness as far back as I could see and then looped back. Probably several feet of 12awg wire. Being an engineer, I figured that this had to have some real purpose, possibly a small resistance for when the blower starts at full power to limit the current. Also possibly to limit peak current and not blow fuses. To minimize confusion, I cut and spliced the wires one at a time since the color codes did not match the service manual and were different colors on both sides of the connector (yellow connects to orange...). Oppie

Reply to
Oppie

MotorsForum website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.