"gogmorgo - rowing gears in a Grand Cherokee" (gogmorgo)
11/15/2014 at 18:50 • Filed to: None
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"gogmorgo - rowing gears in a Grand Cherokee" (gogmorgo)
11/15/2014 at 18:50 • Filed to: None | 1
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Disclaimer: some of you may hate me.
This week my heater flow valve failed, filling the cabin with ethylene glycol mist, and dumping most of my coolant into the passenger footwell. The valve is bolted to the heater core, and can be removed without taking the core out, but it makes it much easier.
Step 1: Drain the coolant.
Done. As mentioned, in my case the Lada took care of this for me.
The trash blew in there because I had my windows open. Didn't think I should be breathing EG. Also, forgive the potato pics... my only working camera right now is my Sonim phone.
Step 2: Remove the heater hoses.
This is arguably the hardest part of the task. Undo the hose clamps and somehow wrangle the hoses off at the firewall end. There's not much space. You'll find it easier to get them back on when you're putting things back together if you take them off at the other end as well and put the firewall end back on first.
Step 3: Remove the center dash panel.
Pop the knobs off the heater control sliders.
Remove the three screws holding the panel in place, one on each side and one at the bottom. You'll also have to remove the screw that holds the passenger side parcel shelf in place, if equipped. Pull the panel back and unplug the connectors for the switches. It's helpful to take a picture so you remember where they all go back in place. Set the panel aside.
Step 5: Remove the heater fan assembly.
Unclip the blower fan assembly and remove it. Four clips, on the sides at each corner. Don't lose them, they will go flying.
Passenger side view. The green boxes around the clips don't exist in real life. Pull up on the bottom tab to get them off. The fan assembly will drop off; set it aside.
There may be wires for the motor still attached, but they're long enough you can get the fan out of your way, exposing the heater core.
Step 6. Give the heater core a gentle tug.
It'll pretty well fall out.
Clean up anything that may have fallen into the cabin air intake, and pull the heater piping out of the firewall. The heater core is the closest thing the Niva has to a cabin air filter... At least it keeps the big stuff out.
As they say, installation is the reverse of removal.
Step the seventh: hate me
The entire process to remove and bypass the heater control valve, and then reinstall everything took just under an hour, and most of that time was spent trying to figure out how to get a hose onto the open hole on the heater core where the valve had previously been bolted on.
The solution was to unbolt the pipe from the other side of the valve and bolt it directly to the heater core. It took me a bit of time to come up with this solution because the pipe in question was what goes through the firewall to connect to the lower heater hose. I stuffed a 5/8" connector through the hole in the firewall in its place, and ran two feet of heater hose in an airplane loop to connect it to the relocated pipe since the pipe stuck out past the hole in the firewall. I'd come prepared with excess hose and a couple connectors because I've discovered that with running hoses, it doesn't matter how many times you measure it, you won't discover that it won't actually fit the way you plan until you've cut it and tried to put it together, and inevitably you'll end up having to connect two cut pieces together because you don't have a long enough piece left over.
I now have permanent heat that I can't turn down except with fan speed, but that's preferable to no heat whatsoever which I what I would have if I'd just bypassed the heater. Driving with the windows down at -12°C without a tuque on because of the antifreeze mist when you weren't expecting to need out of the wind seriously sucked. I'm just glad it happened now, and not later in the winter at a much less warm temperature. I've ordered a new aftermarket heater valve off ebay which is less failure-prone, and the valve delete will do me quite nicely for the next few weeks until it gets here.
Also, those wheel dolly things were left in my garage by a previous tenant, along with a bunch of other tools, until December with permission from the landlord. They're way more fun than they should be... I haven't touched any of his other things, but I couldn't resist trying these out.
RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht
> gogmorgo - rowing gears in a Grand Cherokee
11/15/2014 at 19:00 |
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If you were breathing enough EG to cause issues, you'd probably have other issues. Like suffocating. Breathing in 100+ grams of liquid in spray form and getting it into your bloodstream instead of just choking and gagging would be a neat trick.
Note that I didn't say it's a good idea.
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gogmorgo - rowing gears in a Grand Cherokee
> RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht
11/15/2014 at 19:12 |
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I was starting to have minor difficulty breathing, which is why I opened the windows before it became worse. The cloud of steam was also not great for visibility. It was pretty thoroughly aerosolized and I was breathing very heavy steam that tasted very strongly of antifreeze. Not fun. I've since spent a bunch of time cleaning it off the windows so I could see out them properly again, and I'll have to do a pretty thorough cleaning of the entire interior to get rid of it all. There's a thin coat of it on just about every surface.
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RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht
> gogmorgo - rowing gears in a Grand Cherokee
11/15/2014 at 19:15 |
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I've been there. I'm quite sure a lot of us have. I was mostly teasing as to fatal dose: just remarking the "seriously unpleasant" level of antifreeze in the air is much lower than the point it which it'd actually get you. I've fortunately never antifreeze-greased the inside of a car, but under the hood? Certainly.