This is a Very Common Fault

Richard,

Thanks to your very detailed article I got my wife's 307 Zest well fixed. It all stsrted with speed 2 not working shortly after the car was bought but she never did anything about it. Eventually started to become intermittent on all speeds and during -15 degrees January past it totally stopped.

We were almost killed coming home in -17 degrees C when it failed after we came out from the Smokie concert at the Waterfront Theatre in Belfast, and we had to drive the car 25 miles in 2 feet deep snow on the M2 between Belfast and Antrim ungritted and both the inside and outside of the windscreen iced heavily and I had to use an ice scraper with a poor end which was only clearing a 5 mm wide line for me to see through, it was really scary as we then hit freezing fog and a heavy blizzard and I could see prectically nothing.

Anyway I have since stripped out the fan and removed the resistor bank in the ducting which had very heavy burning around Pin 1, I scraped out the charred surround of pin 1 on the resistor unit and repaired with new Epoxy, the plug connector which pushes in to the resistor was completely disintegrated around the Pin 1 end and the main wire coming out of Pin 1 which feeds direct to the blower fan was burned away totally for about 30mm and very badly hardened for about 50mm.

I cut the wire back and renewed with a new piece of cable and a new push on blue crimp, I then used a junior hacksaw to cut away the charred remains of the receptacle where pin 1 had been and put the new wire on pin 1 and then pushed home the remaining (now 5 pin connector) all is working perfectly now and the cost was a few cuts on my hands, as access is extremely tight and actually I had to remove the damaged connector on the drivers side to get enough length to allow me to cut away the charred pin 1 receptacle end of the connector.

This is to me a design fault on the Peugeots and I think potentially a fire risk, and is caused by the Pin 1 connector in the receptacle not being capable of carrying the Full Load Current for an extended period of time when it starts to burn and blacken and soften the copper of the receptacle. Peugeot should have recalled all cars with this set up and replaced the 59CLM free of charge with a new loom and connector man enough for the job.

I have a photo of the removed Pin 1 connector if you wish to see it I will send you a pic, many thanks for an excellent article which has saved a lot of people a lot of money if they took your advice.

                                                          Paul