Tungsten Posted August 15, 2012 Share Posted August 15, 2012 (edited) DD PAC-2700 and Taurus 3.8 Electric Fan How To Guide The basics The fan and controller Wiring the power supply Wiring the A/C trigger Wiring the factory gauge and sender Programming the controller Wiring the fan Installing the fan Testing, results, and extras Edited August 25, 2012 by Tungsten Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tungsten Posted August 15, 2012 Author Share Posted August 15, 2012 (edited) The basics Converting a mechanical fan to an electrical one has many benefits. Some of these benefits are being able to free up a little bit of horsepower and have a faster warm up time, which adds to overall fuel efficiency. The drawback of doing this is you will need to get some extra things like a controller and a higher amperage alternator to avoid running down the battery. The other drawback is that electrical fans actually take more horsepower to run when running at the same speed as a mechanical fan but you still get efficiency because the fan does not have to run all the time and in traffic the power doesn't really matter that much. I'm not sure if you will need a higher amperage alternator for most other fans but I definitely recommend one for the Taurus 3.8 fan. The factory alternator, which is 70A may be enough for 3000 rpm operation but at idle probably not and that's pretty much when you need to be using the fan. This is why you want one that has more output at idle like the 90A Maxima alternator. Even this might not be enough! Depending on how much total electrical load you will have, an alternator from a Quest might be more ideal or even a Mean Green unit. Here is a comparison of alternators: My pulleys swapped over. (more on this in the maxima alternator threads around here) That's pretty much all you need to do power-wise. If you have a dying battery, now is the time to upgrade it too. One last thing... Do not remove the fan clutch until you have set up the controller. You will need to make sure the controller is properly reading the temperature or you are at risk of overheating. Other things that you will need are your basic electrician tools and supplies. You will need wiring, electrical tape, wire loom, wire cutters, wire strippers, soldering gun, etc. Since the fan draws a good amount of power, you need some 8 or 10 gauge wiring available. If you don't want to buy a spool, you can get away with an audio amplifier harness kit. Edited August 26, 2012 by Tungsten Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tungsten Posted August 15, 2012 Author Share Posted August 15, 2012 (edited) The fan and controller My fan of choice for this project was one found in the Ford Taurus. It's not a regular Taurus fan but one found in high end 3.8 models. On many auto forums, the Ford fan is known to be a top performer and can be acquired for very cheap at a local junkyard and that was exactly the reason I went with one. The fan features an S-blade design and has its own shroud. The fan can also operate on two different speeds. In this project, I will be taking advantage of both of the speed modes. Here it is on top of the factory shroud for size comparison: Now for the fan controller... From what I found the best place to mount this thing was directly to the cooling box behind the glove box. Use one of the smaller Nissan self tapping screws and be careful to not ram through the condenser or you are going to have a bad time. Also, make sure the screw head clears the controller box. Overall, it is a very nice unit. My only complaint is those punch down connectors that they tend to use. Be very careful with them. I found them to be pretty reliable though and I was jamming test leads (don't do this) into them. You have to strip the wire about 1/4 inch then push down on the little button with a small electrician style flat head screwdriver and then insert the wire while releasing the little button. Edited August 26, 2012 by Tungsten Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tungsten Posted August 15, 2012 Author Share Posted August 15, 2012 (edited) Wiring the power supply There are a few ways to do this the easiest way possible by wiring it to the old factory amplifier circuit which ironically just gets its +12v from a fuse that says ROOM LAMP. Since I had an aftermarket stereo put in, I had this living inside the stereo din. Ick! What a mess this was to clean up. Good to go! You can see the little wires tapped into the breakout terminal strip. The black wire is the ground and the blue-ish wire goes to the battery. You can use any 18 AWG wires but I had some spare badly rigged Nissan harnesses floating around and just pulled the wires out of there. Can't say no to free wires! My model did not have a ground pin in the amplifier or stereo plugs. I think the original stereo had a ground strap instead or was grounded via the body through the dashboard sub-frame. I had to run a new ground wire so I ran the ground wire inside the stereo din and hooked it to the relay bracket screw. Then I took one of these fuse tappers and added it as an ignition signal wire so that the controller will only operate with the ignition relays. Here is the link to what I used: http://www.amazon.co...ils_o00_s00_i00 The ignition signal is wired to the fuse that says TURN SIGNAL which is really piggy backed onto METER. I could have just plugged it directly into METER but there was no room. If the fuse ever burns out and the gauges stop working then the fan will just go on to maximum speed for protection. Edited September 1, 2012 by Tungsten Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tungsten Posted August 15, 2012 Author Share Posted August 15, 2012 (edited) Wiring the A/C trigger This step is optional but very useful and I recommend doing it. The A/C signal terminal in the controller expects a signal when the air conditioning system is running. The reason being that the algorithm for running the fan is different than under normal loads. Since the condenser can get very hot, the fan controller will try to keep the system colder by running the fan at longer intervals. Here is where it gets tricky. You will need to open the FSM and find the A/C signal wire. On systems with automatic air conditioning, the signal wire is Orange Black stripe located in the foot well area running to the automatic A/C amplifier. What I did here was literally just strip the wire and shove it in there. Then I secured it with a zip tie so it never falls out. Here is the reason why. Edited August 25, 2012 by Tungsten Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tungsten Posted August 15, 2012 Author Share Posted August 15, 2012 (edited) Wiring the factory gauge and sender A sender is what you need to monitor the water/coolant temperature. The gauge is wired to the sender. Now you have an option to use a separate dedicated sender for the controller for reading the temperature but that requires extra wiring and ramming a probe through the radiator. Luckily, with this controller, you can use your factory sender found in the upper neck of the cooling system. Here is how you do that: Step 1: Start up the truck and wait until it fully warms up. Take temperature readings along the way and pictures of where the gauge is pointing. You will need this data to be able to tell if the temperature read out on the controller is accurate. I used a medical infrared thermometer set to surface temperature mode to take the temperatures from the upper cooling neck as the truck was warming up. Step 2: Remove the cluster and locate the sender port. Make sure it is the sender port and not the voltage regulator by tracing the circuit board. Then attach a ring terminal under the screw washer. Crimp/solder on a spade terminal on your new gauge sender wire. Plug the spade terminal into the ring terminal's female spade end terminal and run the wire down and into the controller. The reason for doing all this is so that you can remove the cluster without having to unscrew the sender wire from the temperature gauge. Note I used a gray wire for the sender but my pre-made ring terminal wire was black. I was just lazy and already had a terminal wire that was made and ready to go. Step 3: Run all of your new wires to the controller. You can wrap them in electrical tape or put them in a wire loom or both. I just wrapped mine up in tape. Edited August 25, 2012 by Tungsten Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tungsten Posted August 15, 2012 Author Share Posted August 15, 2012 (edited) Programming the controller When you fire up the controller for the first time, you will notice it read Er1. That means it is a gauge sender malfunction. The reason why that happens is the sender must receive a little voltage from the regulator in the dashboard to work properly and that only happens in the ON position. The other reason might be that the sender is not being recognized because the controller is set up by default to work with a dedicated sender. To program the controller, first turn off the ignition and take the key out. Then insert the key back in and hold SW2 as you turn the key to ON. Once you see SET displayed on the controller, you can let go of SW2. Now push SW1 to enter the setup menu. Hold SW1 for F (farenheit) or SW2 for C (celsius). After that you can cycle through all the fan operation temperatures. Press both SW1 and SW2 to confirm the selection and move on to the next prompt. Finally, for the gauge sender, select VDO. Apparently the factory cluster is compatible with VDO gauges. At least mine was! Thanks to that, calibration was not required. The settings for the temperatures should be as follows: Low Fan ON = 175 F Low Fan OFF = 165 F High Fan ON = 185 F High Fan OFF = 176 F If you do need to calibrate then follow the instructions in the booklet (or download them online). Basically you will need to turn the potentiometer marked custom adjustment. Doing so, you will manually manipulate the gauge and then confirm the temperature on the controller. Oops! Too far... Make sure the engine is cold if you wish to custom calibrate the unit. Don't forget to turn the potentiometer all the way back when you are done. If you still can't make it work or don't want to play guess-a-temp then you can always resort to a dedicated sender. Anyway, most likely you will get the thing running on VDO mode. Mine was pretty damn accurate there! The controller was reading 165 F while idling after a complete warm-up. Looks good to me (I have a stock 170 F thermostat)! The reading was taken while still running the fan clutch, which is to make sure that the controller is properly reading the sender before putting the electric fan in. Pro-tip: By default, the temperature will not display. You have to hold both SW1 and SW2 until it pops up. Edited August 25, 2012 by Tungsten Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tungsten Posted August 15, 2012 Author Share Posted August 15, 2012 (edited) Wiring the fan The fan controller uses ground loop control and relays. Basically when it needs to turn the fan on, it will close a circuit to the relay by activating the ground. The grounds are labelled as Fan High and Fan Low on the controller. Therefore, the fan controller will require two relays for operation and you will need space to install them. I found the best place to install the relays was on the inside fender next to the battery. On some models this space contains a DRL module but since mine did not have one, I had free space to install the relays. You can see how the battery here conceals the relays. Positive terminal connector: Negative terminal connector: As you can see I used an AGU fuse holder with a 50A fuse to fuse the fan from the battery. The large amp AGU fuses are cheaper to replace than large blade type fuses and AGU holders are water sealed by design. Time to splice the main connector on... Finally, the ground relay loops can be routed through the firewall using the drain hose hole. Edited August 25, 2012 by Tungsten Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tungsten Posted August 15, 2012 Author Share Posted August 15, 2012 (edited) Installing the fan The next step is to install the fan. Before that happens the old one must be removed. Remove the bottom shroud piece (mine was never there). Unbolt and tilt the shroud over the fan then while the shroud is holding the fan unbolt the fan and remove the fan out of the gap. You can either remove the fan from the fan clutch first or remove the fan clutch with the fan on it. Some foam insulation can be added to the fan shroud to fill those gaps... The fan assembly should be able to stand nicely by itself on the bottom radiator tank. There is only one hole to mount the assembly to the radiator. The rest can be filled in with through-core mounts. Pro-tip: To mount the lower through core tie, you can remove the radiator mounts and slightly tilt the radiator out of the way. If it doesn't want to come up, just loosen the top driver's side bumper mount bolt. Edited August 25, 2012 by Tungsten Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tungsten Posted August 15, 2012 Author Share Posted August 15, 2012 (edited) Testing, results, and extras The controller and fan was completely wired and working now... So I went for a test run to see what trouble spots came up... At first I ended up losing the mounting bolt. Apparently the shroud is a little too heavy for a self tapper, I am going to have to reinforce the bolt with a nut. Fixed. The other thing that happened is the ACC circuit actually turns the fan on. I have to re-wire the ignition signal on the controller to be the ON instead of ACC. Since the gauge sender does not work in ACC mode, the controller goes into safe mode and just turns the high speed fan on. Fixed, see post #4: http://www.nissanpat...an/#entry634830 Finally, there is something weird going on when I turn off the A/C with the high speed fan. The engine seems to want to bog afterwards. Not sure why this happens but my theory is the ECU can adapt to the load but it can't adapt to the load being taken off. If anything, I can disable the high speed on the controller. Fixed. The ECU needed some regular driving to adapt to the new setup. That's it! Other than those small issues, the fan works like on any production vehicle that ever came with an electric fan. My temperatures have never been more consistent than they are now. The only drawback of this fan is that it will not cover the entire radiator but it's a non issue. My favorite part is the 30 second fan run delay (which is programmable) when the vehicle is shut off while the fan is running. The low speed keeps the motor plenty cool in traffic so the high speed may not even be necessary. I only wired it in as an option. Edited September 1, 2012 by Tungsten Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ahardb0dy Posted August 15, 2012 Share Posted August 15, 2012 nice write up so far. You go into good detail and than do this, "What I did here was literally just strip the wire and shove it in there. Then I secured it with a zip tie so it never falls out." You with all your knowledge have to know there are numerous other ways to do this, either use a scotch lok connector, or a wire tap and male spade terminal, or even just do like the alarm guys do and strip back the insulation, wrap the new wire around and solder it or just tape it. You were probably in a hurry or being "lazy" as you refer to other things yourself. No excuse, we can wait for your writeup do it right ! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tungsten Posted August 15, 2012 Author Share Posted August 15, 2012 (edited) I did that with the dome light when I added an extra map light and lighted visors. The zip tie was removed when the wires were soldered together and sealed. It all came out like that, which is the best method of doing this. In this case, it has been fine by just piggy backing a wire inside the connector. There is plenty of stuff there to hold the wire inside the connector. I agree that it's definitely not the best way but it makes me feel iffy when I have to hack into more important factory harnesses. I set up the entire thing for now where the process can be reversed if I ever wanted to pull everything out. I also did it for testing purposes just in case it was the incorrect wire. I did verify that it was the correct one by checking with a multimeter after I already plugged it in. If the wire falls out or ever becomes an issue, I will tap it in like I did with the map light but that requires ripping the harness apart which is sealed with wire tubing. That can be a real pain! Since it's really not a crucial wire for fan operation, it should be fine like that. Edited August 15, 2012 by Tungsten Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
banx Posted August 22, 2012 Share Posted August 22, 2012 (edited) tungsten I have a couple of questions and I'm hoping you can help me out.... my pathy already had an electric fan conversion on it. However, it appears it wasn't running a controller like yours. It was wired to the same 'box' as yours with the 12vdc unit under the hood. as well as what appears to be a tie in on the cooling system, might be a/c.? but my a/c does not work. I'm pretty sure it's missing components now my issues..... the previous fan only had a 2 pole switch. I put in an electric fan from a crown victoria. it was huge but didn't have the cfm needed to properly cool the engine. however, it worked on the wiring the previous owner did...... it was running at about 68% on the hot cold guage on my dash. and would creep to 80% at a standstill in traffic. which was too high. so I went to the junk yard again and grabbed a ford taurus fan. however, the station wagon taurus had 2 fans. even labelled 1 and 2. so i ripped it out. these fans have a 3 pole plug instead of the previous 2.... I combined the 2 red wires (similar to your pic) and connected it to the truck the way the old fans were running. i get no action from the fan. even with just one red wire the fan will not turn on. when i connect the fan directly to the battery with both red wires connected the fan fires up nicely. when i seperate the reds, there is a noticable difference in cfms between the two red wires. i labelled them high and low. now I'm faced with a decision. can i safely hardwire the fans with a fuse and toggle switch directly to my battery safely? say a switch for fan 1 and a switch for fan 2? have one wired for its high setting and one for low? or do i HAVE to go buy a fan controller? the alternator has been upgraded by the previous owner and appears to be one from a maxima.... i'm also not running a/c so is there even a reason for tying into the a/c system? i just don't want to destroy my battery. but I'm supposed to go on a decent adventure this weekend and I don't want to overheat my truck sorry if this has been asked already and for kind of hijacking here. Edited August 22, 2012 by banx Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tungsten Posted August 23, 2012 Author Share Posted August 23, 2012 No problem. You can safely hard wire the fan to the battery without a controller but only with a fuse. It's not an issue to have the fan running all the time. You will need a switch to shut the fan off when you shut the engine off. The only problem when having a fan with no controller is inefficiency. Do not shut the fan off while the truck is running because the temperature gauge lags. You will have a high chance of an overheat if you try to manually control the fan. PM me with some pictures of the current installation and I will try solve your fan and electrical problems. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
banx Posted August 23, 2012 Share Posted August 23, 2012 thanks, I will take some pics from camp when i get there tomorrow. I did however, hardwire the fan in. i used just one fan and ran it on it's high setting. put a 20amp fuse in line and a toggle switch. took it for a boot and let it idle for 20 minutes. stays at about 40% on the gauge. cheers the pics you posted helped me Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
andreus009 Posted August 23, 2012 Share Posted August 23, 2012 I run a dual fan system with individual switches for each fan. Voltage to activate the relay is tied into the ignition so that the fans go off when the engine is turned off (no accidental leaving them on). I run both fans constantly. I originally had a controller but it was mounted in the engine bay and when it got hot it would malfunction. Anyway, the controller was basically a waste anyway since when you kick on the AC it turns on both fans fully anyway. I live in Florida...we are always running the AC. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tungsten Posted August 23, 2012 Author Share Posted August 23, 2012 A cheap controller is a waste. It doesn't do much at all that's actually useful. Unlike many controllers, this one also has a fan off setting. You can never over-cool the radiator like that. The real reason why you want the controller is fuel efficiency. You don't want the fan to be on while the engine is warming up. You can do it manually with switches but it's not the ideal way. I prefer my stuff to be autonomous and do the work for me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
andreus009 Posted August 23, 2012 Share Posted August 23, 2012 (edited) Well mine did have an off setting (i.e. fan didn't run when cool enough) and had variable speed on the first fan. However, once the AC was turned on both were on full blast. I would have left in, but it kept malfunctioning when it got too hot. Only happened on the trail cause of slow moving. If had known that in advance i would have mounted in the cab like it looks like your doing, but they said it was okay to be in the engine bay......NOT! No Doubt your controller is better quality than mine was. Edited August 23, 2012 by andreus009 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tungsten Posted August 25, 2012 Author Share Posted August 25, 2012 (edited) Never mount a controller outside unless it's extremely well protected from the elements and is in a relatively cooler location. On that note, that's it, the write-up is completed. Enjoy. Edited September 1, 2012 by Tungsten Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tungsten Posted April 5, 2013 Author Share Posted April 5, 2013 Update: I slightly reinforced the fan shroud to the bottom lip here so it doesn't want to jump around or pop off. Also changed the location of the fuse for easier access and view. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hytekrednek Posted April 5, 2013 Share Posted April 5, 2013 Sweet write up. I will be looking to do this to my Pathy soon as it starts to get warmer here in GA. James Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tungsten Posted April 5, 2013 Author Share Posted April 5, 2013 (edited) Thanks. It works great and best of all there are no extra sensors to install. I have been running around with this setup for a while now and had nothing but great results. The controller is extremely reliable and will never fail (just don't put it near water). Made in USA quality stuff. I am looking into adding a switch to the A/C wire so the high speed fan doesn't come on as often with the A/C on and adding a parallel charging harness to the alternator to avoid burning the stock wire out. I'm also looking for a better way to power the controller than just wiring the 12v and GND source to the stereo. Edited April 5, 2013 by Tungsten Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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