Hi fellow Hiveians,

Today I'm really glad that I have some confidence and skill to try to figure out why something is happening!

Importance of DIY Confidence

These days, one of the things that I find is an incredibly important for a number of reasons, is to be able to encounter a situation and not freak out about it, and instead being able to take a step back and think rationally and calmly about what's going on.

That statement could be applied to a number of different things these days but for me in particular, this was something that I applied to a situation that occurred with our car. Several weeks ago, I decided that it was probably about time that I changed some of the filters in the car and these are incredibly inexpensive and easy to change for anyone, particularly people who don't have a lot of DIY or repair knowledge under their belt. When you are starting out doing DIY and self repair things, one of the most important things is to start with the small wins. Deciding that you're going to take apart your engine to swap out an alternator likely isn't a good idea for someone who isn't very familiar with doing things on their own to a car. Instead, it's always best to start with smaller things and then build confidence and skill along the way.

Another thing that is important for me and others here is to try and include children in these things as often as we can! I had the little man with me and he was helping me off and on throughout the process. He was doing his own thing playing but I would call him over, ask him questions or consult with what he thought was going on and it was a great experience for us both.

This job here is one that is an excellent starting point for anyone who is looking to level up a bit when it comes to learning how to fix some things for themselves with their cars. The filters that I swapped out here were the engine air filter and the cabin air filter. These are both fairly inexpensive and incredibly easy jobs to do, and ones that help build your confidence levels and add some additional skills to your repertoire. The other benefit with this one is that it saves you some money! If you brought your car to a mechanic and asked them to change the filters for you, they would likely charge you 20% markup on the filters themselves and likely 150$ or more in labor costs even though it likely took the mechanic not even 3 minutes to change all of them.

The filters were 25$ for the engine air filter and 10$ for the cabin air filter. That's a heck of a difference versus what a mechanic would charge you LOL. Granted, not everyone wants to do these things nor cares about saving easy money like this, and mechanics certainly deserve some incredibly easy jobs and money when they can get it, so there's no fault to the mechanic on that part.

So I changed the cabin air filter and I moved on from it, not really thinking too much about it. I'll be posting another one about that one as it was quite the unique situation, let me tell you lol. That's a story for another day though!

For the cabin air filter though, after I changed it my wife was mad because she said I broke the car. To someone that does DIY or repairs themselves, that's pretty insulting LOL we don't like to take a hit to our pride when it comes to the jobs that we are doing! I did notice a noise after I did it though so I knew that there was another piece of the puzzle that I had to figure out.

Sadly this took me a number of weeks to get squared away though haha. I had a bunch of other things going on and the weather wasn't incredibly hot so it wasn't exactly high on my priority list to get the situation figured out.

What was occurring was that when we turned on the air conditioner in the car, it would make this strange noise and it was like a vibrational noise but not necessarily something that was a clicking noise. It was a difficult noise to figure out what exactly it was! So I was pondering on it for a while. I finally decided that I should give it a whirl and get it fixed.

One of the first things I did was of course check the engine bay. With an air conditioning issue, one of the things that you definitely don't want to let happen is for the air compressor to die. That's not the end of the world but it is a bit expensive to replace, there are a number of connections to it and pressurization and all that, plus the chemicals in the compressor as well. At the end of the day it's not the worst thing to have to replace but it's not what you'd want to be doing if it was something easy that you could correct.

I determined that the sound wasn't coming from the engine bay after turning the air conditioning on and listening to the engine bay. I consulted my partner in crime, the little man, and he agreed. We did learn a little bit about the engine fan though! It kept kicking on and he was a little nervous about it but then I realized it was the radiator fan. We had a little chat about where it was and what it did, it was a nice learning opportunity all around for the little fella!

So now that we determined that it wasn't an issue with the engine bay somewhere, I turned my attention to the inside of the car. There are a few elements to take into consideration here, one of them is the blower motor. You do NOT want the blower motor to die on most cars, because that is a bitch to replace! A lot of cars you have to take the damn dashboard off to get at the full blower motor and that's a huge pain in the ass that you don't want to undertake. I absolutely had to figure out if that was it lol.

Thankfully it wasn't that, because I was looking around and one of the blower motors was actually under the front glove compartment which was nice. I was able to easily locate it and inspect it. I turned on the AC and gave it a listen and the motor was working and blowing air. I didn't hear any crazy noises coming from it that would signify that it was broken. It was time to pop the filter off and figure out what was going on!

In the pictures above, the first 2 are the cabin air filter location. This is often located behind the glove compartment in a car. There are ways you can take the glove box off entirely and I did that which made it a lot easier. I removed the cover keeping the filter from getting messed up or falling out and removed the filter. I inspected around and got a good perspective of everything that was going on here. The top part was open to the air which surprised me, I thought it was going to be enclosed or something but it wasn't. I could see the sky from under there lol.

I turned the air conditioner back on and I heard the sound, except I heard it better this time! I was getting closer.. I made the kind of stupid move of sticking my hand inside the area where the filter was hahaha. Not something I would advise others! I could have chopped a finger off for sure if there were sharp blades in there lol but thankfully there wasn't. I did get whacked in my finger though!

I turned the air conditioner off and whipped out my phone to see what was going on. I took a few pictures and then pulled it back to see what I was dealing with there. I saw the motor blades and castle nut keeping it there. I moved to the second picture and found the freaking culprit!!! DAMN I was excited to see that little shit LOL

It turns out that there was some debris on the lower blower motor in my car! That little shit was causing the grief that we were experiencing and I couldn't have been happier. Not only because I found something abnormal but that I likely didn't have to do anything crazy to get rid of it. Sure enough, I turned the blades a little bit and I was able to get the little shit out. I put everything back together and turned on the air conditioner and turned that shit up full blast and NO ABNORMAL NOISES! Huzzah! I was stoked that I figured out the damn cause of my issue lol

I showed the little man what it was and I showed him how to take it all apart, the vent clip and removing the cabin air filter so that he knew what I was doing and got to do it himself, and had him put his hand in there with me. The AC was off of course, so the motor wasn't blowing but I put my hand in there first to show him that it was safe to do so, and I showed him what was in there with the fan blades and that we could move it. He enjoyed getting into the mix of it and seeing what was causing the issue. We put it all back together and turned on the AC to see that the issue was gone.

It's always a good time when you can go out to do a DIY job and return back into the house in 20 minutes successful! It doesn't always happen that way hahaha you sometimes are out there for 2 hours and then have to tell your wife that you have to go to the parts store for this and the tool store for that and are gone for another 2 hours trying to get the right things. Thankfully this was not the case and we were done and wrapped up with the car back in working order in 20 minutes flat! Score! :D

I write this from a place where I have done a fair bit of work on our cars and around our house to diagnose and fix small things so that they don't turn into bigger things but they also don't necessitate us spending unnecessary money bringing the car to a mechanic to have them figure it out and charge us 300$ for their time. I saved us some money, learned a bit more about our car and the different things that go on with it and I passed on a little bit of knowledge to my son as a slow osmosis of things that I've learned over time, hoping that one day he can do the same when he gets older.

Having the small wins and the basis to start to help ourselves is important I think! It just adds to our knowledge base so that we can better look at a situation in the future that arises, either for ourselves or if a neighbor has a comment off hand about something small like that. All of these things build our confidence to take a look at a situation from a step back and eventually see what we can do to figure it out!

^-CmplXty. _{Real human written content, never AI.}

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