I have some RX450h, and highlander hybrid blower fan motors in my garage, that i have been thinking if anyone here, has been able to repurpose them. I have tried applying 12V 1A adaptor to some of the terminal points of the blower fan motor, but each time i do that, the fan blows for some seconds and stops. Is there a way I can hack the pinouts and make the fan run, instead of stopping sometimes? Does it means, the blower motor wasn't able to run, because of the amperage used to "excite" the blower? Thanks PS: i think, the pinouts are 4. Which of them would need power for it to run?
What years are they from? I've never looked in a HiHy or RX450 repair manual; I only have easy access to Gen 1, 2, and 3 Prius ones. It might help to know which of those these HiHy and RX450 blowers are most like.
Your post is not really a question about a Gen2 battery cooling fan... What I do know about Gen2 fans is that despite being a 12v fan they only demand about 7v at peak power and when they're run at full 12v after a while they develop the symptoms that you describe. What we've done to address that is use one of these to keep the voltage low and slowly dial it up to speed in the same way the Prius does it:
That's a "brushless" DC motor- so besides power and ground, it needs some kind of variable pulsewidth signal to tell the controller chip on the PCB how fast to spin the fan. Might be 0-5V or 0-12V. Looks like pin1 is power, pin4 is ground, pin2 might be a (speed) monitor, and pin3 is likely the control. All three fans are protected by a 15A fuse. Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.
Here's a diagram. VM goes to the "battery voltage sensor", while SI goes to the hybrid control ecu. Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.
I had noticed that myself in the Gen 3 liftback diagrams a while back and thought it kind of amusing. One ECU is responsible for telling the blower how fast to run, but the signal for how fast it is running goes to a different ECU, which converts that to a message packet, and sends it over a serial line to the first one. At least back in the Gen 2 Prius days, both signals went to the same ECU.
