Using a Power Probe Tester to Troubleshoot Failed Electric Front Seats

I have a couple cars in the shop today and I'm troubleshooting some electrical problems you know what else is new on these old cars one of them is a very difficult problem to troubleshoot and another one just has some problems with power windows power door locks and I'm doing some basic electrical diagnosis now when you go after these type of problems you know generally you would get a volt ohm meter maybe you would get a 12 volt test light and many times you might grab some sort of a 12-volt power source this is a booster pack with a jumper lead so it gives 12 volts here and you want to test a motor or test a power window regulator mechanism so the jobs I'm going to show you today can be done with these three tools but what I want to show you in this video is one tool that will do it all and do it much better in fact this is one of my favorite absolute favorite tools when it comes to some serious electrical troubleshooting and that's the power probe this is the power probe I'm sure if some of you been around automotive maintenance for any length of time you've already heard about this tool and you've probably already got one because this thing is real handy now the purpose of this video is not to tell you how to use this I'm not going to go over all the features there's just a ton of videos on YouTube and information on the internet about this tool you can just google power probe and you'll get all kinds of information on how to use this and the different functions that it has but today I'm just gonna show you a few applications of how I use it and specifically how to use this when troubleshooting some really interesting problems on a power seat one of the greatest features of the power probe is the amount of wires that comes with it you have 20 feet of wire here which allows you to go all around the car and test electrical items and also allows you to go to a workbench which you'll watch me do shortly here to test a motor and it's really easy to hook up you just take and hook up the red lead to the positive post your battery and the black lead to the negative now you've heard me talk about troubleshooting before you always make sure that you have a fully charged battery or at least over 12 volts before you start doing any electrical troubleshooting if you're using the car's battery what's nice about the power probe is I can hook it up like this notice I love the lights and I just push forward on the rocker switch tells me right away I have 12 point 7 volts in the battery now with this cable I'm going to go over the workbench and show you how I test an electrical motor I have a w126 I'm trying to figure out what's wrong with the power door locks well first thing you want to do is test the motor and you do that with power probe by going in and touching the contacts let's see I'm going to touch this contact and then I'm going to touch the other one that powers the motor and then I'm gonna push forward on the rocker switch okay you can hear the motor running I'm going to reverse direction by swapping the leads push forward and I can hear the motor running the other direction now what I can do is I can hook up a vacuum gauge and see if this is properly sucking and blowing which I will do later on today but for now I just wanted to show you how you can remotely test an electrical motor using this extra grounding lead that's located close by the power probe on the 300 SD I also have a power window that's not working now I've removed a door panel to do some other work inside the door you don't have to remove the door panel for this test but what I want to do before I worry about switches or anything else I want to make sure the motor is running all the way up and down and powering this window and I can do this with a power probe now keep in mind this car is located on the other side of the shop about 15 feet away from the battery in the other car and I can just bring this over without lugging any other tools and we can test to see if this motor is running now I'm going to locate the two wires going to the motor they're green and black and the way this works is you power one way the window goes up you flip polarity and your power the other way and the window goes down so I'm gonna hook the ground to this one doesn't matter which one then I'll put my probe into the other contact now I'm gonna push forward and power it see that window comes all the way up now I'm gonna disconnect it hook the ground on that side come in here and probe and power it all the way down so right away I know my motors good I've got to start looking elsewhere now let's go over to this other car that's got this memory power seat problem I've said this before and I'll say it again anytime you're troubleshooting an electrical component that's not working look at the fuse box but in this case you need to do more than just look you need to test and this is where the power probe comes in watch is I'm going to test the fuse and the circuit for the memory seat on the driver's side now I will get the chart here in the fuse box lid and right away I see that the driver seat with a memory is fuse effuse a is located right here I don't have to push any button I'm just seeing if there's power here no power and you think oh it's not working well you have to understand how the system works you're not gonna have any power to this fuse until you open the door remember you open the door and then you can adjust your power seat so I'm gonna open the door and let's test the power inlet to the fuse that's at the bottom there watch as I reach down with the probe and touch okay twelve point six volts and even though the fuse looks good I can come up and touch this top contact point and I'm getting twelve point six volts so with this test I know I don't have any problem with the fuse as it's related to this memory power seat so I've been messing around with a switch and no amount of movement on any of these contacts pushing the buttons moving the levers back and forth is causing the seat to move it's totally frozen this is really frustrating because how am I gonna get the seed out if I can't move it four and aft well you might be able to power it from these contacts here but you need to be really careful you need to do a little research and find out which one of these wires powers the seat if you start applying power to the wrong wire you could burn out a component so I'm just warning you to be careful okay now I'm going to unplug these plugs notice there's only two plugs a lot of these power seats have three or four plugs so that kind of gives you a warning right away the other thing that gives you a warning here is look at how small all these wires are engaged these are very small gauge wires which leads me to believe these are probably all ground circuits okay so I'm not gonna apply power here but I am going to apply ground it looks like the center contact is probably ground let's check yep it's showing us a ground now I'm gonna connect the small ones I'm a rock the switch back to ground them okay nothing there nothing there let's take this one I'm not getting any movement in the seat at all nothing nothing now of course if you have another switch you can try another switch but I suspect this is not a switch problem there's a possibility you know you could have broken wires at the door hinge but I doubt whether all of them would be broken so I think something else is going on we're gonna have to pull the seat and get to the wiring at the memory module now to do any further troubleshooting I was able to get the seat unbolted from the frame and get it tipped back now that was not easy but we won't go over that in this video and here you can see the memory seat module right here the little black box okay as I look at this you can just kind of study it with me you see a number of plugs coming out of the back of the module and these go to the seat motor so you got one two three four five plugs there I've got three plugs up front one of them has all those colored small wires coming from the switch and here you can see these two red wires and brown wire look at how big these wires are so it's pretty obvious that this is gonna be our power plug let's unplug this and see all right we can use the power probe now I don't know there's a brown there which is usually ground and I don't know which one of these three that goes to so the power probe can actually tell us that watch okay that one is power twelve point four volts oh that's the ground and that kind of fools me because I would have thought this would have gone over there let's check this one power twelve point four volts so I have power to the module and I have a working ground from the module so that's not the problem if the power of breaking down somewhere in route to this module either through a relay or a fuse you know I wouldn't have any power here so if I unplug this one these are the six wires going up to the switch and I've already taken and grounded these directly and I'm not getting any movement in the box so this leads me to believe that I'm going to have to replace this module in the meantime I need to get this seat working so I'm going to show you how I can do that using the power probe I'm gonna take one of the plugs out of the back here I don't know which motor this goes to but we'll find out okay now let's take a look at it all right you've got two large pins and three small pins so we know the large pins probably the leads going to the motor if I power it one direction the seat will move one way and if I power at the other direction the seat should move another way once again I don't know if this is tilt or four and a half so just like I did with that power window regulator I'm gonna hook the ground to one of these pins and then I'm going to power this with the power probe with that ha I got the for now now if I want to take the seat out now I can get to the bolts on the track assembly I'll take and reverse this back and look I'm gonna power the seat the other way okay so now you can see how you can use a power probe to move a power seat as long as the motor is working if you can get underneath it and you can get to the plugs now I'm gonna go ahead and order a new module in the meantime I'm going to take all these plugs off the module and I'm gonna shove them down here on the floor tie them off to the back of the seat and I will be able to just the seat when I want to drive the car now until the new module comes using the power probe that you see here so I've just shown you a few examples of how this amazing tool can be used to solve a number of different electrical problems [Music]

Channel: Mercedessource

Views: 94,494

Keywords: mercedes benz, Mercedes, benz, Kent, bergsma, DIY, do it yourself, how-to, how to, mercedessource, mercedessource.com, chassis, model, car, automobile, diesel, engine, diesel mercedes, fix, repair, cheap, inexpensive, problem, troubleshoot, troubleshooting, fixing, mercedes diesel, maintenance, Power Probe, II, III, ground, green, red, light, testing, motor, open, ohm, meter, electrical, porlbme, gremlin

Id: 9IXIFPASnS8

Length: 12min 28sec (748 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 10 2018