Auxiliary Coolant Pump Replacement

[Gus_Mahn]

Anybody have any tips on doing this? I've searched and found little to nothing. I have little heat at idle or with the fan on high at cruise. It gets a little warm at cruise. I've bleed it properly three times and ran the self-diagnostic on the control unit. After idling 20 minutes there was some heat, but the auxilary pump was still cold, so I'm pretty sure it isn't pumping water. The DCCV was replaced, and nothing changed after bleeding, but I'm happy to have the new DCCV in, since I've had lots of plastic cooling part failures.

Man it's buried down there. I got the DCCV in quickly, but the pump looks like a bigger PITA! Any advice is appreciated.

 

[brack86svo]

I just did mine.

I removed the intake and upper radiator hose. I removed the top hose completely from the pump and car. I pinched and moved the bottom clamp down, unbolted the pump and pulled it up and out of the bottom hose. It was not fun at all but, could also have been worse. Mine is a 2000. Not sure if it's any easier or harder on a gen2.

Not sure if that will help at all, that's the best I can tell you though.

2 weeks after I replaced the pump, now my DCCV took a crap, so I get to look forward to that now.

 

[oddball]

Gen 1 or Gen 2?
On my Gen 1 it's not terrible to get to. Easier if you take off the upper rad hose.

I don't know that the pump would get very warm. The motor is pretty well insulated from the coolant. You can definitely feel it when it's running though. Just grab ahold of it - if it's rumbling, it's running.

BTW, make certain the DATC is actually signalling on the water pump relay. It grounds the coil. Turns out my pump was fine, but my DATC wasn't grounding the pin. Figured that out after buying and rebuilding a pump, of course.
Let me know if you don't have the wiring diagrams and I can get them scanned.
Interestingly, a 2000 DATC works correctly (but has other oddities with the Auto mode that I think was a year 2000 "feature"), and another 2002 DATC from a junkyard has the same aux pump signal problem.

 

[Gus_Mahn]

It's an '03, so it's a 2nd gen. No pump vibrations with the car on, so I'm sure it's not running. I wasn't really talking about the motor getting warm. The heater core tubing is all warm even hot to the touch. There is no heat in the impellar housing that I can feel. The heat actually still works pretty decently as long as you are moving. With the engine at idle though, the heat pretty much goes away.

I'm going to go ahead and change the pump. Other than the radiator itself, pretty much all of the plastic cooling parts are new, and we've already had a couple of plastic failures on the road. The car has 175,000 miles.