Fix my seat heater

Mr. Goodwrench…the driver’s seat heater on my 2004 Tahoe comes on by itself and won’t go off. The dealer said my choices are to replace it for $500 or disconnect it. I had them disconnect it, but that also disables the seat adjustment functions. Is there a way to disable the heater without the rest of the seat adjustment functions. The small blue plastic multi tab male/female “connection” they unplugged is under the seat.Please advise. Thanks.

I question the verdict that its either disconnect and loose everything or pay #500.00. What I don’t have is a FSM that shows if the power seat functions and the heated seat functions are controlled by the same module. I do have a FSM comming from books4cars (the do appreciate us mentioning them and I have not had a credit card security problem come up)

On the model before yours I knew of no-intergration between the two functions. I do believe your model (first available in 2000?) is the first to have the heated seat option.

My insticts tell me that the functions can be seperated(retain power seat,disable heated seat) Maybe a outside the module(if there is one)hard wire revision is all that is called for. I will take a look.

No doubt the wires for the heat and the power functions go through the same connector block. To keep costs down, why would GM use two separate connector blocks? Anyway, if someone can trace which wires from the connector go to the heating element, they can be cut and taped over (on whichever side of the connector is easiest to get to).

As for the dealer, they’re a bunch of lazy and/or greedy vermin if they’re going to charge $500 to snip a wire. Upstream of the connector at the seat, the two systems should be separate. I suspect you simply have a stuck or broken switch for the heater function. I doubt it would cost $500 to fix that, either.

Connector block we can deal with. It would be a problem if they were controled by some kind of module. If you can wait a little I will tell you which wires (when I get my FSM’s for you car) Unless somone can beat me to it. I was doing a lot of googling yesterday (looking for my topics,and guess what,Trojan agents,took me about 2hrs to clean them up,you must really know you sites these days, I am only going to google on my cheap computer from now on)

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I find firefox with adblock plus as a great start in addition to a good antivirus/spyware solution. I don’t know about these cars, would it be possible to look under the seat and easily identify which wires go to the seat heater and clip and tape? Would that cause other problems with the cars being so smart?

Absolutely a look under the seat may be all thats required. I would like to see the control circuit. Interesting story,tech was trouble shooting some complaint with uneven heat and he was spending hours could not get any heat on the seats,turns out you need the seat belt buckled.