# Engine cooling fan issues.



## NickD (Dec 10, 2011)

Who knows since they don't giver this information in the shop manual. What we do know is there are three fan relays in the underhood fuse/relay box. Under the lid of this cover, shows the location and function of the fuses and relays. Looking for a lo, medium, and high. Odds are good, one of them has dirty contacts.


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## ChevyGuy (Dec 13, 2014)

As Nick says, it's a 3 speed fan. "High" can be referred to as "jet mode" as it's rather loud - and pretty much never comes on if everything is OK. 

What kind of problem are you running into? A common one is the fan won't turn on in the lower modes - only jet mode. It's a burned out resistor pack that's part of the fan assembly.


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## NickD (Dec 10, 2011)

Talking on pro board about the outrageous price for automotive parts, the list price for the exhaust system on my daughter's $13,000 Kia Base model shows a list price of close to $3,000.00. Just talking about cheap pipes here, not the rest of the vehicle.

New fan for the Cruze is 13427161 
 FAN & MOTOR 1.4 LITER TURBO, AUTO TRANS
$302.74 List, your price $172.62


List price of over 300 bucks for this POS? Saw a far superior three speed much larger fan even with oil fill holes at Walmart for only 16 bucks! Could try installing one of these, but would need a rather long extension cord. 

Oh, that 16 buck fan from Walmart has screws in it, was using one in my garage for the last 20 years and quite dirty, took it all apart, cleaned and lubricated it, switch contacts were dirty, wife asked my why I did this. Didn't want to pay a recycling charge to get rid of it. Looks and runs like new again.

But the ones used in our motor vehicles are strictly throwaway, can't even replace a brush in these things without wrecking it.


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## Robby (Mar 1, 2013)

OP?

Details on what made the question are needed for us to make any useful suggestions.

Rob


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## NickD (Dec 10, 2011)

Engine overheating is a possible symptom of fan inoperation in particular in city driving.

Was originally proposed on FWD vehicles to put a cam gear driven right angle fan that would always rotate when the engine was running, naw, lets go electric instead. Worse case cooling occurs when the alternator is least capable of producing a large enough output current to run this fan. When the engine is at idle and stalled in traffic.

Sure a lot of effort was put into fan control when the absolute HP even the largest engine could consume was far less than a half a HP. But this is what happens when you have idiots in charge, like a disease. Guess they never heard of the windmilling effect when driving at any speed at all.

But after over 125 years of the IC engine using more than 85% percent of its energy to heat up the atmosphere rather than make the vehicle go someplace, like to pick on the fan. Talk about making mountains our of molehills, prime example. And really a major disaster today with aluminum and plastic under the hood. 

Another really stupid thing was using the engine ECT to control the fans, not bad on the highway, but in city driving, would get thermal cycling between 195 to 235*F with an aluminum head on a cast iron block that has seven times the expansion rate causing head gasket problems. Least this was cured on the Cruze, but not sure why at 221*F/25 psi pressures, so you are wondering why this car has so much cooling problems. Along with that fan.


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## jblackburn (Apr 14, 2012)

NickD said:


> Engine overheating is a possible symptom of fan inoperation in particular in city driving.
> 
> Was originally proposed on FWD vehicles to put a cam gear driven right angle fan that would always rotate when the engine was running, naw, lets go electric instead. Worse case cooling occurs when the alternator is least capable of producing a large enough output current to run this fan. When the engine is at idle and stalled in traffic.
> 
> ...


The Cruze runs between 219-225F in normal operation. Climbing a hill or putting a heavy load on the engine will open the thermostat and drop temps to 201 or so. Fan kicks into high at 230F; runs on low or medium speed with A/C on, depending on high side pressures at the condensor.

I've never seen an alternator have a problem running the fan at idle on ANY car. Yeah, it makes the little 1.4 chug a little harder, but it's perfectly capable of producing the power. If anything, the fanbelt driven cars we've had were even more prone to overheating in traffic than the electric fan cars.

And the radiator is so massively oversized on these tiny little engines that it's rare that it even needs the fan.


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## NickD (Dec 10, 2011)

Ha, did you ever design an alternator like this kid did? Goodbye 40-50 amps, hello 100-200 amps. Designing these high output alternators was easy, the hard part was making them just as cheap or cheaper than the low output ones.


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