How Could They Have Missed This?

A couple of days ago, Lisa decided to take a shot at trouble-shooting the blower fan on my van's heating/air conditioner. (I will hereafter call this the "fan," and I don't mean the fan that keeps the engine cool, so I hope that's clear.) As regular readers know, that fan has been intermittently failing, and the dealership was unable to find the problem. Lisa found it in about ten minutes. She first tried the main power connector, and when that didn't make a difference, she wiggled the wires running in to the fan motor. Presto: the fan started (and stopped) depending on how she wiggled the wire.

( Photos of the work and more detail )

Although Lisa's work has restored the fan for now, there's no telling when it will quit again, or even if still wiggling the green wire will restart it, but at least when it does quit again, I'll know exactly what's wrong. I'll still probably hire someone to replace it because they're apt to have better tools and a better idea of how to get that fan in and out without having to pull the entire air conditioning unit. (I hope.) But we are very unimpressed with the dealership's diagnostic skills. If Lisa found the problem so quickly, they should have found it right away, given that (at least in retrospect), Lisa was trying some of the most obvious things by simply poking at the motor.