Porsche Enthusiasts Club Forum

Ok, a quick recap... So I'm in the middle of France and a couple of days ago spent so long in standing traffic that the fan was running constantly. When we got to the hotel I realised that the fans were running on far longer than normal after the ignition was switched off. Ten mins later they're still going so I end up pulling the -ve terminal of the battery. For the rest of that day I did that otherwise the battery would have gone flat. Went to the local PC and almost had a heart attack at the money they wanted for the rad thermo-switch and fan relay - second mortgage stuff going on! When I next got into the car I heard the fan rate change so at that point realised it was the relay rather than the switch that was at fault (otherwise the fan would have just run at full all the time rather than defaulting to the slow A/C cooling speed).

Anyway, last night I was fiddling with the fan relay yesterday and took the aluminium box cover off it - no wonder it's expensive as there is quite a lot of stuff going on in there! I couldn't see any obvious dry joints - although to be sure you'd probably have to re-flow the lot - but I took a few minutes to clean up all the spade terminals and squirt a load of GT85 all over the place in the relay box. I was also fully prepared with some plastic segments to stuff between the relay's inner contact terminals just to stop the fans but needed to identify which ones to isolate so installed the relay without its cover. Sure enough, the fans kicked in but stopped if I put slight pressure on the PCB.
As I started to lift the relay the fans stopped again, so I carefully levered it out by the base - remember there's no cover and using the PCB to pull it out would have probably knackered the relay - and squirted more GT85 down the relay holder's slots. Cleaning the terminals appears to have resolved part of the problem as the fans are now stopped when the ignition is off, but the A/C fans come on as soon as the ignition is on .... I can live with that for the time being!

Oh - and another 500 trouble free kilometers today, just the GPS decided to take an unapproved holiday this morning...

No gratuitous car pics today as the linespeed here is so shite...

Sounds like there is no doubt that the relay is shot.

Can you ask a friend to buy one and mail it out to you? I'm sure Jon at JMG could work something out and get one sent on Monday on a next day service...

Thanks - it's working ok as it stands at the moment but we're not in one place long enough to get it posted anyway. I'll hopefully have something sorted out by the time we get back.

Muchos

Greg

Had a similar problem on my 944 and had to pull the relay to stop the fan after parking up.

It turned out to be a faulty switch for the fan and wasn't that expensive to fix when I had a minor oil change service.