I am having a bit of trouble with my 2002 Sebring, which is just fresh out of warranty, of course. :-)
The blower control seems to be the symptom, but apparently not the cause of my issue. When the blower is set to full-on (position 4), all climate controls work normally albeit at maximum output. When the blower is set to positions 0, 1, 2 or 3, there is no air being blown out of the vents at all.
I suspected that perhaps the rotary switch was not making good contact in all cases, so I disassembled it and bent the contacts up just a hair so that they had more tension against the switched contact points. As I really thought would be the case, this did not change anything. While I had the rotary switch apart, I made sure to note which the common terminal was so that I could map out the outputs for each position.
The connector has 8 positions, 5 of which are populated with contact points arranged like below (shown looking into the connector on the switch itself, so the connector coming from the wiring harness is the reverse of this). There are two contacts for the common position (position 1), so I've noted a
1 twice to reflect that.4 5
3 1 2 1I found the following using an ohm meter to see what contacts where shorted to the common contact for a given switch position.
Position 0 (no contacts shorted to common) Position 1 (contact 4 is shorted to common) Position 2 (contacts 2 and 4 shorted to common) Position 3 (contacts 3 and 4 shorted to common) Position 4 (contacts 4 and 5 shorted to common).
In order to fully eliminate the switch itself, I made a wire jig so that I could short the contacts of the mating connector on the wiring harness in this same manner. Consistent with using the switch itself, the only arrangement that enabled the blower was shorting position 1 to positions 4 and 5 for "full-on."
It would seem to me that there are two main possibilities. The first would be that something is wrong in the wiring harness, but positions 1,2,3 stopped working under normal use, with no bumps, jars, etc. that might cause a connector contact to break loose. The second would be that whatever electronic control watches the position of the blower rotary switch is not operating properly. Is this function handled by the main engine computer?
If anyone has any hints as to what might be wrong with my blower control function, I would really appreciate the help.
Thank you!
Scott