Had my lovely Voyager 2.8 crd 2005 since spring. Cold weather has appeared and i drove for 90 mins in 8 degrees, had climate control set for 22 degree inside car, the auxiliary heater light and external cabin heater would not turn off. Is this normal? I did turn the heating on and off a few times, but the little orange wavy graphics appeared everytime.

I checked when I stopped and sure enough the heater under the car was whistling after shut down. I assumed the auxiliary heater only came on till the engine was warm enough to cope.

I live on an island and 4 hours away from a chrysler garage, is there a fuse i can pull to overide the auxiliary heater as a short term fix if there is a problem?

many thanks
Steve.H.

 

Btw the temperature is in degrees is celsius. To recap for the fahrenheit population, it was 46 o F outside and i wanted it 77 o F inside.

 

No it is not normal. The aux heater should turn off when the engine is up to temperature (coolant temp above 80 degrees C)

Not sure about a fuse, although there is probably a multiplug at the aux heater that you can unplug.

But you need to get to the underlying cause. Engine thermostat comes to mind. Your engine temp guage should get to slightly under half after about 5 minutes of normal driving. If it never gets above 1/4 or so then your engine thermostat is stuck open and needs replaced.

 

Thanks for the reply. engine temp goes to half. strange thing though, if i turn the passenger temp down below 16 deg celsius and the driver temp below 19 deg celsius it turns off. (not all the time)

At least I know it's not normal, which saves me looking like a plank at the garage.

logic says it's a sensor of some type.

 

That is normal. Another thing to try is to let the let the fuel guage get to below 1/4 level. When the fuel is this low, the aux heater should not come on at all no matter that you do. This is a fuel saving measure when you're low on fuel.

If your car does this, then as you say, it's likely to be a sensor issue. Check for any stored fault codes.

Unhelpfully the Chrysler manual states "Aux Heater can not be switched off:- Check heater operation with DRB-III and replace components as
required."

Which is basically saying check for fault codes and replace whatever sensor is not working.

 

Something a little more simple before digging through sensors, etc. I've had something similar, last year when I got my 2.8 CRD it had a radiator leak, which got repaired. For a while afterwards I had a similar fault, constant aux heater on. It always switched off when fuel was low, and if you dropped the in-car temp down I think its 5oC from where you had it. It will turn off in that situation (unless it had just turned on, there is a run-on/run-off period which may explain why you can't get it to turn off instantly every time whilst testing).

Anyway, I noticed that the garage had overfilled the radiator quite a bit above the max mark, so my theory was that it was taking it a lot of effort to 'heat' the overall volume circulating and not reaching temperature. This certainly matched what the in-car temp gauge said.
I drained a little a while back and have noticed that the car temp gauge now reads up to just over quarter generally (sometimes creeping to just under half-way), and the aux heater seems to cut out at a 'normal' amount of time after the car warms up.

Worth a 5 minute check to see if you have similar before digging away at sensors, etc.

 

Looks like you've got a faulty engine thermostat. Temp guage should always get to just under half-way.