This morning I was driving the old BMW to work when the HVAC blower fan quit suddenly while I was passing through a slice of a small town about fourteen miles from our home.
I hoped that the cause would simply be a fuse and continued on my way. The way home was quite warm since top down is not nearly as much fun at 90F and high humidity as it is at 80F with dry air. AC would have been much nicer but was not an option, since without the fan it would have had little effect.
Got home, changed into shorts and tee and lifted the fuse box lid for the first time ever. BMW divided every circuit and gave it its own fuse. The fuse block of this fairly simple BMW actually has forty six positions, one of which was for the HVAC blower. That fuse was in fact blown so I swapped it out with one of the provided spares and was rewarded with a running blower fan.
Easy.
Nice that BMW isolated the circuits well enough that a single point failure would only take out that function and not a number of others as is more typically the case.
I hoped that the cause would simply be a fuse and continued on my way. The way home was quite warm since top down is not nearly as much fun at 90F and high humidity as it is at 80F with dry air. AC would have been much nicer but was not an option, since without the fan it would have had little effect.
Got home, changed into shorts and tee and lifted the fuse box lid for the first time ever. BMW divided every circuit and gave it its own fuse. The fuse block of this fairly simple BMW actually has forty six positions, one of which was for the HVAC blower. That fuse was in fact blown so I swapped it out with one of the provided spares and was rewarded with a running blower fan.
Easy.
Nice that BMW isolated the circuits well enough that a single point failure would only take out that function and not a number of others as is more typically the case.