My car's heating was stuck on a luke warm on the passenger side for ages and a scan showed the motor was kicking up a fault. Having gotten a motor from the scrappy yesterday I thought I'd have a go at fixing whilst having some spare time.... turns out it's remarkably easy! Here's how to do it:

 

Firstly, pop the side panel off the end of the dashboard by levering it off at the obvious gap.

Then take the glovebox out. This is pretty simple, it's just one screw behind the side panel, three in the top, and two on the underside. Then it's just a case of carefully wiggling it down.

Behind that, you'll have two connectors; one for the glovebox light and one for the airbag switch, they both just pop off. The airbag one is easier to undo by just putting a screwdriver into the hole where the cable goes and pushing the block release backwards.

Leave the large flexihose for the glovebox aircon, you'll have enough roon with it not getting in the way.

 

Once you've done all that, it'll look like this:

 

Undo the screw marked in the picture with the arrow and slide out the big, plastic footwell heating pipe you've just undone.

The motor you need to get out is here:

 

It's only held in with the one screw at the lower marked red arrow. Once this is off, carefully lever it up and... it's a bit difficult to describe this bit... wiggle the top bit around so that it unhooks. The motor actually looks like the below picture so you can see the bit you're trying to unhoop is the loop on the top left which is simply placed over a little nubbin to keep it in place once the first screw is securing the entire unit. (Don't worry about that third hole, it just pivots around in midair and isn't actually used)

 

The once you've got it off, sort of rotate the motor clockwise and eventually the yellow circular rotor arm bit will slide/pop off. There's a little plastic block built on to the rotor arm which has to line up roughly with the corresponding gap on the long darker yellow arm of the cabin flap it's attached to. When they're lined up, it'll simply come away. Bit backwards to say it, but once you see them apart it'll become obvious what you're trying to achieve when refitting. Undo the connector and remove.

 

Refitting is just the opposite,... and is why I can't show you the little plastic block which lines up on the rotor arm cos I snapped it off!! Before you put it back, have a look at the movement of the long dark yellow flap arm on the centre console you're attaching the rotor arm to. It freely moves back and forth and you'll need to fiddle with it by hand to allow you enough movement to clip the top hoop back over that nubbin as the rotor arm will be absolutely rigid. I found that once the two yellow bits are linked and you've rotated the motor back to something similar to correct position, keeping the motor high & fairly horizontally straight and manually moving the cabin flap arm towards the engine bay/back of the dashboard, it eventually looped over.

I snapped the little block off trying to twist it in, so don't do that! Just be careful with it and it'll go. It's useful to try a dry run getting the hoop over without linking the yellow bits and without them connected there's no tension. Youll see how it all interconnects that way.

Once it's on, it'll easily pivot down to allow you to put the bottom silver screw back in.

 

One final thing, after you've disconnected the airbag switch in the glovebox, the easiest way to get it back on is to undo the two screws above them on the top of the glovebox so it comes apart. This way you can just push the connector back in, offer it back up to it's normal position (there's lugs on the rear of the glovebox, you can't go wrong!) and put the two screws back in.

 

Good luck!!

 

***NOTE***

I actually tested the motor was working and the one I was taking out was knacked before I put it all back together and it confirmed it WAS the problem I was having. However, I did it with the airbag switch unattached/unplugged. When I turned on the ignition the 'AIRBAG OFF' sign below the climatronic was flashing and when I put it all back together I'm now left with it saying AIRBAG FAULT on my dash every time I start as well as the orange airbag light on the cluster (just needs clearing, though, very simple). So I don't know if this'll work, but if you're also gonna test before reassembly, it might be worth unscrewing the switch from inside the glovebox and plugging it back in before turning the ignition on so that the ecu doesn't register a fault. Might work, might not, but if it does it'll save you needing to clear the fault code and subsequent dashboard message.

 

 

One would imagine the driver's side is a mirror of this, but I've heard that it's a real pig, probably because of the steering rack and other gubbins around there, but at least it'll give you an idea.

Assuming it's fairly generic, and the part numbers are the same (1K0907511Q £107.37 motor , 1K0898002B £23.97 lever unit), the quote I got for Skoda to do this was just under £300, with labour at 1.4 hours but even with me fudging around just using common sense and logic, I reckon this took me around 30 or so minutes to do!

Edited 21 February, 20179 yr by blackspaven

Great write-up!

Cheers. It was gratifying to do but I'd had that 'this is going to be painful to do isn't it?!' series of thoughts going round my head for about 4 months since it looked likely that was the problem. Turns out it was a piece of p1ss!

Canbus is always live ain't it?! Think if you want to avoid the airbag fault kicking up you need to disconnect the battery whenever you're gonna disconnect the airbag switch in the glovebox.