[DIY] How to fix your ventilated seat when blinking

[AJ170]

Is your Nissan or Infiniti ventilated seat just slowly blinking when you try to turn it on? Well, that's because your car is unfortunately affected by some kind of rare sporadic bug that causes the connector pin for this function to randomly burn out while in use.
My passenger seat is unaffected, and I've even replaced my seat with one from a Q70, and it's still burning out.
After reading on here about people trying to add inline fuses and then the pin still melts without popping the fuse, it had me thinking the fuse didn't fix it, unplugging it did.

So all you gotta do is simply unplug and replug the connector, and it will be fixed.
When I did this, my pin burned out 1 day later, so I repeated the process, and it's now been about 3 weeks, and no issues. I just no longer use the high setting.


GUIDE:

Step One:
Slide your seat all the way back.

Step Two:
Slide your seat all the way up, it should now be all the way into the back seat and as high as it can go. (you do not need to adjust the backrest, just the actual seat location)

Step Three:
Using this image, you want to unplug the circled connector (this is the driver's seat, should be similar for the passenger), I used the camera on my phone and had it set to the face camera and placed it on the floor so i could see what im doing, a mirror would also work or taking the seat out of the car.


Step Four:
This connector is a pain in the a** to get out because it's literally melted to the pin, I gave myself a small blister on my thumb due to how hard it was to pull this out the first time. Next time I'm gonna look into modding the connector to make it easier to remove.



Step Five:
Once the plug is removed, verify nothing is left behind in both the connector and pins (I used a camera to verify)



Step Six:
Now, just replug it in until it's fully inserted, start your car, and verify that it works. (repeat steps if necessary)

Optional Step:
take your seat filter out and replace it or clean it (heres an alternative cheaper filter from a Ford F150 you can use in your seat [im using it]https://a.co/d/4ARJPBx), and use a Q-Tip and alcohol or something to clean the individual flan blades after removing the filter, when i did this i noticed the air blowing into my b***s!!!

Unverified Testing:
Since I've made this adjustment, I no longer use the maximum settings on both heat and cold, and I also now wait for my AC to start blowing cold air before turning on the AC seat (only takes a minute).

[VStar650CL]

Cleaning or replacing the fan filter periodically isn't optional, it's absolutely critical. The reason is, the climate seats use a device called a Peltier Plate to produce both heat and cold. Peltiers are a nice concept, they're a solid-state electrical device which you run current through in one direction and produce cold on one side and heat on the other, reverse the current and the hot/cold sides also reverse. Easy to see why they're well-suited for an automotive climate seat. I won't go into exactly how they work, here's a Wikipedia for those interested:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_heat_pump

The thing about Peltiers is, they're a heat transport device. In order for the cold side to get cold, heat needs to be sucked off the hot side. In order for the hot side to get hot, cold must be sucked from the cold side. When there's no differential, both sides get hot, and more importantly for us, the internal resistance of the device stays much lower than it should. That's because of a cute thing called the Seebeck Effect, which acts to increase the internal resistance of a Peltier as the temperature differential between the sides rises. So here's the rub: The fan's whole job is to vent heat from the hot side to cool the seat, or cold from the cold side to heat the seat. With insufficient airflow, Seebeck never happens, so the Peltier sits there getting hotter and hotter and drawing way more current than it should. With a dirty filter, the controller can't even identify the problem. It knows the fan is spinning but has no mechanism to know if air is being moved. So that excess ground current eventually burns up and melts the ground pin on the controller. You can sometimes restore contact there (as the OP did), but it won't cure the underlying issue (the fan) or restore the efficiency of the plates, which are often permanently compromised. The best DIY fixes I've seen all involved modifying the connector to allow soldering a new wire and inline connection to the ground pin.

This story has a simple moral: Clean the filter. System failures all start there.

[AJ170]

Cleaning or replacing the fan filter periodically isn't optional, it's absolutely critical. The reason is, the climate seats use a device called a Peltier Plate to produce both heat and cold. Peltiers are a nice concept, they're a solid-state electrical device which you run current through in one direction and produce cold on one side and heat on the other, reverse the current and the hot/cold sides also reverse. Easy to see why they're well-suited for an automotive climate seat. I won't go into exactly how they work, here's a Wikipedia for those interested:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_heat_pump

The thing about Peltiers is, they're a heat transport device. In order for the cold side to get cold, heat needs to be sucked off the hot side. In order for the hot side to get hot, cold must be sucked from the cold side. When there's no differential, both sides get hot, and more importantly for us, the internal resistance of the device stays much lower than it should. That's because of a cute thing called the Seebeck Effect, which acts to increase the internal resistance of a Peltier as the temperature differential between the sides rises. So here's the rub: The fan's whole job is to vent heat from the hot side to cool the seat, or cold from the cold side to heat the seat. With insufficient airflow, Seebeck never happens, so the Peltier sits there getting hotter and hotter and drawing way more current than it should. With a dirty filter, the controller can't even identify the problem. It knows the fan is spinning but has no mechanism to know if air is being moved. So that excess ground current eventually burns up and melts the ground pin on the controller. You can sometimes restore contact there (as the OP did), but it won't cure the underlying issue (the fan) or restore the efficiency of the plates, which are often permanently compromised. The best DIY fixes I've seen all involved modifying the connector to allow soldering a new wire and inline connection to the ground pin.

This story has a simple moral: Clean the filter. System failures all start there.

Thank you for your detailed response about why these break, sounds to me like it would be a good idea to replace the filter yearly and make sure there's no obstructions to the airflow under the seat

[VStar650CL]

Thank you for your detailed response about why these break, sounds to me like it would be a good idea to replace the filter yearly and make sure there's no obstructions to the airflow under the seat

I dunno about yearly, that's probably excessive unless your car is a total dust-bucket or you use the climate seats 365. Nissan/Infiniti didn't exactly make them easy to service, so every 3~4 years is probably fine for most folks. The point is, the owners' manual won't tell you anything about it, despite the fact that a clogged filter guarantees eventual failure. They don't all melt, sometimes the FET's inside the controller blow or the solder joints in the Peltiers crack and go open-circuit, but something bad is bound to happen somewhere in the system. For Peltiers, breathing is life.

[AJ170]

It's now been a few months since ive done my "fix" and so far no issues, I also took VStar650CL advice and now I verify there's NOTHING on the floor behind or under my seat so there's no obstacles for the air.

I've also been using the max settings for heat and cold and after I can feel the air blowing, I turn it down or off.

I also have a remote starter installed and turn on the seats before using the remote starter so my seats are warm.