Hargisdej

Climbed in my 2011 JKU Sahara the other night to go home. Riding topless and got a little cold so I turned the heat on and I got cold air from every vent. After reading a thousand threads from clogged heater cores to blend door issues to faulty controls I started troubleshooting. Heater core supply and return were both too hot to touch. Actuator on passenger side controls which vent you get air from (defrost, head, feet, etc...) fully functional but irrelevant. Temperature control knob doesn't change the temperature a single degree in either direction. I didn't want to take the entire dash out just to check the actuator on the driver side if it was the control knob so I laid down in the floor and wiggles my way underneath the dash with a flash light to see if I could see the actuator. I pulled the floor vent loose and got it out of the way, and turned the control knob. The actuator acted like it wanted to move but didn't. The white lever attached to the actuator has a little metal rod on it that fits into a slide on the white lever that is attached to the blend door. I carefully pulled on that lever until the metal rod came out of the blend door lever so they were no longer attached. I was able to reach up and move the lever attached to the blend door with my hand and when I pushed it all the way up I got the flames of hell that you're used to getting from a Jeep so I figured the actuator motor was bad. I turned the control knob from cold to hot though and the actuator functioned perfectly. So with the lever on the blend door pushed all the way up (where it looks like it's vertical) and the control knob turned to the hottest setting (so the lever on the actuator is up as high as it will go) I fit the metal rod back into the slide to reattach to the two levers. Then, I turned the control knob from hot to cold and everything worked perfectly. I tested it probably 20-30 times just turning the control knob from hot to cold back and forth and it functioned perfectly every time. When I turned it to cold I got cold air when I turned it to hot I got heat. What I think happened was that when I turned the control knob to cold the actuator may have closed the blend door a little too hard and that the two levers were binding. This might be a unique case but with all the threads on the issue and no fixes I figured I'd share my experience just in case. Good luck out there.

mrzw70

Thanks for the detective work. Should benefit someone some day.

Jahamm88

Digging up an oldie here but is this fix still working? I recently purchased a new control panel thinking that was my problem but im still not getting any movement out of the driver side actuator and might give this a try tonight.