Iowa has been hit pretty hard this winter. Since mid-December, we’ve gone through four blizzards; totaling just shy of a full meter of snow… a week of -15F and lower temperatures, BEFORE windchill is factored. Crazy stuff, I say. The latest blizzard, I was privileged enough to drive home in… bad choice.
So earlier this year, I removed the plastic skid-panels from the undercarriage. They were broken/torn from all the little critters and regular road debris you find where I live… I don’t like to hear them dragging or seeing them hang… so I took them off. My intention was to get a metal substitute I’d heard about, but this didn’t happen… So, last Wednesday afternoon I drove home from Des Moines, just as the drifting from blizzard #4 took full affect on the roads. Plowing through drift, after drift, on rural roads was NOT what the Bonneville needed… especially without those skid-panels.
I arrived home safely (w00t!) only to find that my car smelled; a burning metallic smell, from under the hood. I popped the hood to find this…
My engine is packed with snow. Not good. (the metallic smell was the exhaust manifold melting snow that came in contact with it… horrid smell, like welding… eww)
I let the car run idle for quite a while in my garage, hoping the heat from the engine itself would melt what was covering the vitals. This idea worked great. I turned the car off after maybe 45 minutes of idle run time, and knocked the bigger chunks of snow off with an old push broom handle. I thought nothing else of it, went in for supper, then had a nap before getting up for work the next morning.
The next morning, I took the Jeep to work. No problems getting there; but did have a few second thoughts on whether to *attempt* some of the crossings and drifts that challenged my presence on the road. None-the-less, I made it to work and back home, safe and sound.
Yesterday, the first day since Wednesday last week, I started my car. It ran for an unknown amount of time warming up before it died. The idle cable was frozen, so the computer couldn’t adjust the spray. Bummer. Oh no, the “Service Engine Soon” light is on. Major bummer. OH SHIT! MY BLOWER ISN’T WORKING… AGAIN! UBER BUMMER!!!!
Since there were multiple things wrong, I asked some colleuges if they had any suggestions. Bryan offered the idea of hooking my car up to an OBD2 reader to see what the error code was that was causing the SES light to come on. I bought one tonight after work, came home, ran the kerosene heater in the garage for a few hours to thaw my car the rest of the way, and hooked it up to the OBD2 reader… “Holy beeping bumble-bees Batman! It’s a fuse!”
Tomorrow morning, I’ll be hitting up the closest O’Reilly Auto for a 30 amp Maxi fuse. Fingers crossed that my blower motor is not damaged… it’s took f00king cold to drive an hour+ each way to work without heat. (!!!)
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2009-01-13 UPDATE:
Turns out I had two relays go bad, and one fuse pop. Additionally, the blower motor is toast, again… still no heat in my car. Yay.
New motor will be here Thursday or Friday… arghZ.
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