Heated seat element gone kaput

[Dylan]

Hey,

I just picked up my 02 A4 Avant recently, only to find that the drivers-side heated seat element isn't working properly - the side bolsters (on the seat part) heat up, but the center part on the seat and the back don't heat up at all. Passenger side is fine.

Does anyone know if you can pull the heating element from, say, a Jetta or other VW to put into our seats?

Has anyone else experienced this problem and has some feedback for me?

In b4 "there's a search feature" - tried that, didn't find what i was looking for.

TIA

[Dylan]

:(

[Ill 3.0]

There is a "add heated seats to non-heated seat car" DIY for B5 on AW. But most of the work is in adding the wiring harness. Honestly, you're probably better off finding new (used) seats from a salvage yard. I tried to swap the heating elements off my stock rear bench seats to my new Recaro rears and gave up. So it can be done, but taking your seats apart is very difficult.

[Ill 3.0]

this is what I was talking about:
http://www.audiworld.com/tech/int.html

[drmarcj]

Most likely an element has broken (it's just one continuous wire that heats up). You can fix the element with solder or buy a replacement from the stealership. On my old B5 (cloth) it was not too hard to pull up the cloth and actually find the break (there was a little burn mark where it broke) and solder it back together. This might help a bit.

Eventually it will fail again since the solder is not flexible, so replacing the whole element is preferable. You could always swap elements from passenger side to driver side.

[Dylan]

thanks folks - i was hoping to pull the passenger seat element from my wife's jetta, but methinks i'll try and source one from a junker...