Last month the heater in our Highlander stopped working. The knob on the left controlling the fan and the knob on the right controlling the direction of the air worked just fine, but we couldn’t get warm air no matter where we set the center knob.
That seems like a fairly easy problem to track down and fix, right? Well, yes and no. It was fairly easy for our mechanic, but the part took over a week to get here and it cost $831! Andy asked for the old part, to figure out why it was so expensive.
Oh, the “part” was a module, controlling not just the heater but the clock, hazard light, passenger seat belt warning, the rear window defroster, etc. Welcome to the modern car.
On the plus side, our car is twelve years old and Toyota did have the part. We’re grateful for that.
February 3, 2014
We had the opposite problem with the heat in our house. It wouldn’t turn off when the temperature when above setpoint. It was a 10 year old programmable thermostat. After I replaced it, the heat wouldn’t come on at all — had to go into settings and “tell” it was controlling a heat pump.
We’ve had the same problem with our furnace which is only 15 years old. The plumber kept coming back & Tom told him everything he knew that was happening. I think Tom knows more about our furnace than the plumber but he claims not.
And, then, after posting this comment, we realized that the heat pump was just blowing cold air and that the temperature in the house was 3°F colder than it should have been. Air conditioning guy had to come out for it. Turned out to be something called a “run capacitor.”
Kaitlin and Torben had trouble with their furnace a while back. Montana loves to lie across the grate to warm up, and she wasn’t at all pleased when the air was cold. Now she always checks it out with her paw first.
At least you did not have to change the whole car!
We agree!
oh good grief charlie brown.
Then there’s tomorrow’s post…. Fortunately we don’t expect things to go smoothly.
PS CommentLuv is linking to your last post on peanut on the table instead of http://thecozyminimalist.com/ If you sign in with your new URL people will see what your latest post is.
My car is 15 years old, but luckily I’ve never had to fork out the equivalent of $831 to fix anything! I’ve had some odd things go over the years – the speedometer, the passenger window mechanism – but they only needed simple replacement parts. The clock also stopped working for a couple of years, and then suddenly started again when the battery was changed! Figure that one out.
You’re lucky! I’m curious about the window mechanism. Is it the old fashioned roll-up kind? We were nervous about the change to the automatic ones, figuring they would be expensive to repair, but so far we haven’t had any trouble. Probably because we don’t use them much — and that’s partially because we’re not sure how. Some of us are easily confused by this new-fangled stuff.
I don’t have a car, now…so I cannot comment
But it does seems that many individual things in cars, are now bandied together in a combined “board” as Andy found out with the central “knob”. I remember that a tail light got bust…and I had to replace the entire panel (both sides) because they weren’t separate any more. I remember the mechanic saying “when were you born, we haven’t had separate units for a very looooooooong time….
A similar but slight different problem is when you break the frame of your eye-glasses and even though the lens are just fine, no “frame in stock” fits them any more! Or similar.
I just had my hair cut today and the lassie and she was telling me that hair products have a similar problem, you really have to know all the technical details of various brands because say “leave on for 10mins” may not be quite the same with a similar product/different brand which might be “leave on for 20mins”
Presumably they make things in modules because it makes it a lot quicker to assemble the cars. We’re concerned the more expensive repairs mean cars are becoming more like computers — after a certain age it will be less expensive to buy a new one than to do the repairs. We prefer to keep our cars going as long as possible.
No, it was an electric window mechanism. It just produced a horrible crunching sound one day. My theory is that it broke because I hardly ever used it and the parts all rusted up.