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First post here. Recently purchased a 2004 Acura TL base, and have noticed the passenger heated seat not working. After searching the forums I've found the following info:
The passenger heated seat is only heated on the bottom portion of the seat. Great, less to diagnose. A common problem is the small wires being broken, causing the element not to work.
So I dive into it... And here's what I find.
1: Unbolt seat, unplug harnesses. Using a test light, check for power going to the heater plug. The 3-wire plug has power on the low and high setting, depending on where the switch is set to. Great, no fuses blown, MUST be the element.
2: Fight with the hog rings, get the leather off the cushion, and detatch the element off of the cushion. Set it on the bench and have a really close look at the small wires. I went over it about 3 times, and cannot see anything wrong. No burn marks anywhere, no broken wires. Hmm.....
3: Using a 12v battery, and a few alligator clips, I de pin the plug and give the wires power and ground. The circut is complete, and works. With 12v going to the green wire, it is going through the entire element and coming back to the white wire, and giving me 12v when I probe with a test light.
WHAT AM I MISSING....... the element does not heat up at all, doesn't matter which wire (white or green) I give power to. Im guessing those two black boxes are the temperature switches that trip when the low or high temp is reached. Could those be my problem ?
Thank you in advance for any help, I will attach pictures of my test circut. Red wire has two small element wires coming out of it, and come back around, one going to ground and one going to white.
" WHAT AM I MISSING....... the element does not heat up at all.."
Did you check the element for continuity?
He did say above he tested the whole circuit
"" 3: Using a 12v battery, and a few alligator clips, I de pin the plug and give the wires power and ground. The circuit is complete, and works. With 12v going to the green wire, it is going through the entire element and coming back to the white wire, and giving me 12v when I probe with a test light. ""
I have heat element issue with the driver's side seat back, the bottom works fine. I'm curious what you'll find out here then I'll tackle the issue next summer.
Given a pretty basic knowledge of electrical circuits, I believe it should be a 3-wire connector, correct? If so, the 3-wires you should have one wire that's 12+ power, one ground wire, and the third should be a signal wire via a predetermined voltage signal that determines how much power the heating element gets, which, in turn, determines how how it gets (low/hi). So, by the laws of computer-controlled electrical circuits, you can have power and ground completing your circuit all day long and, as your probing around concluded, your circuit it testing good on either end of the wires. However, unless you have a signal voltage delivered by a dedicated signal wire, the seat-heater won't be warming your cheeks anytime soon. Good luck with the repair, and please, don't forget to let us know the details after you figure it all out!
I'm in almost the same boat - '05 TL, passenger seat heater not working. I'm not trying to hijack your thread, but maybe we have a similar problem. I started by checking continuity - nada between either 1-2 or 1-3 - which is different from your case. Per the factory service manual (FSM), the heating pad is bad, so I tore it all apart (damn hog rings....) expecting to find burn marks or a broken wire. An hour inspecting the pad turned up no burn marks, no broken wires, even looking with a magnifying glass - similar to yours. My intentions were to jump any broken wire, but that's impossible since I found nothing. The obvious next step is to replace the pad, but with no visible issues and reading your post, my confidence level that the pad is the problem is not 100%. So my questions, which I think will help both of us, are:
1) Could the problem be in those boxes? Did you ever figure out what they are for?
2) Any other common points of failure in these things? Other parts of the wiring harness for example.
3) Could the seat wires be bad but show no signs of breakage or burn marks?
4) The boxes appear to be an integral part of the pad so buying a new pad covers both bases. Correct?
I don't mind springing for a new pad (well, at $180 I actually do.....), but I'd like to up my confidence in that being the problem.
To follow up on my previous post, I spoke with an Acura parts guy, who confirmed that if there is no continuity in the heating pad, it is indeed bad. So I took a gamble, sprung $170 for a new one, plus hog rings and hog ring pliers. It's all back together in the car and works just fine now. So something was wrong with the heating pad, even if it looked just fine.
For the record, it wasn't a particularly difficult job. There is a trick to attaching the hog rings, but once you figure it out, it goes very quickly. One tip - after removing the hog rings on both sides rods, remove those rods (that run parallel to the length of the car) from the seat cover before removing hog rings that go across the seat. It makes folding the seat cover back a lot easier. The other two hurdles involved the lower side trim piece. The seat belt is attached to the seat, so the trim must be removed and installed while the seat is in the car, which is a pain. And the plug for the power seat controls, while easy to remove, required loosening the switch to get the plug back in. All pretty straight forward stuff though.
I fitted the new heating elements to the seat bottom, and wired them in accordingly. The only difference now is there is no low/high temps, just one set temp in either switch position. While this may not be acceptable to some, my wife is more than happy... Lol.
And, imo, these pads throw more heat than the factory ones, at least more than my driver's seat does. If the driver's seat ever fails, this will be my go-to replacement part.
Good to know we have an option to fix that feature...not sure I want to take my seat apart for that alone but if I do, I'll be sure to slap some new elements in.
11-13-2018, 08:40 PM
What am I missing?
