Rear heated screen not working

[Scott_FR]

Yet another annoyance with my FR. For three years old, it certainly seems to have suffered a lot of issues due to either poor build quality or cheap parts used.

Had a quick search, but couldn't find anyone else with this problem. Love being a trailblazer!


Anyone else had this happen?

 

[chrisRibiza]

It's pretty poor and takes ages to work in my car although it does eventually work.

 

[Scott_FR]

I was in the car for 15 mins with a light frost on the rear window and you couldn't even see 'the lines' starting to melt. Defo not working.

 

[chrisRibiza]

That's exactly the same as mine. There's a few threads on here about it being pretty useless.

 

[Scott_FR]

Wow, so basically not fit for purpose? Obviously designed for all the frost they get in Spain!

Might have to rig some kind of blow torch arrangement up for the rear screen.

 

[martin j.]

Only used mine once so far this year but I thought it pretty effective.

 

[weirdkerr]

Never had trouble with either of mine up here in the Artic tundra of northern Scotland..... (I'm on my 2nd Leon)
check the fuses..... as I did have trouble on a Skoda Fabia nearly 10 years ago....

 

[Scott_FR]

Whilst fitting a new heater matrix over the weekend, and faced with the fuses, thought I'd have a look at this. 30A fuse was fine.

Pressed the rear heated screen button and could hear a relay click loudly, but didn't know which one it was. So pulled each of the three visible ones out in turn to see which one was making the click. Good old 646 was the winner.


Pulling it out, something immediately caught my eye.
Yep... That looks a bit melted!


Sure enough, some matching melty goodness on the relay:


And a close up showing the charred pin, obviously causing high resistance of a high load circuit.


So I've bought a lovely clean replacement from a breakers. Will have to have a go at cleaning up the terminals inside the fuse board to make sure there is a good connection. Will probably Dremmel the old relay open to see what kind of mess that's in.

Still a bit worrying as to why it happened in the first place.

 

[chrisRibiza]

Did you ever get your rear screen working?

Its getting to that point in the year when the rear screen working would be useful. I just checked the 30a fuse and also the relay and both look fine, definitely nothing melted or charred.

I might buy a new relay and fit it to see if it fixes it as they are pretty cheap.

 

[chrisRibiza]

Update: I changed the two 646 relays round as one controls the 12v sockets and the other does the rear screen.

My 12v socket still worked with the other relay so maybe my rear screen is just rubbish