Because my wife’s car hates us this month we are replacing the radiator cooling fan. Watched a video and it’s fairly straight forward (for a third gen) but the guy does it without removing the bumper. question for the group, remove the bumper to get radiator out or keep bumper on and do everything from the top?
The electric fans that I've replaced on Honda's and Toyota's, I do them from the top. I haven't done a gen3 Prius though. Usually just 4 - 10mm bolts. Have you run power directly to the fan to make sure it's the fan motor and not the controller or relay? Good Luck....
the fan on the gen 3 doesn’t bolt on, the shroud encompasses the entire radiator so you need to pull the radiator along with the fan. Like everything else Gen 3 it’s next level stupid design
could have swore someone weighed in (@ChapmanF?), suggesting you supply power directly to the fan, to verify it's indeed the problem, not some switch/relay/wiring issue.
While I'm all for sticking my hands deep down in there and blindly changing parts, but if you're doing a radiator on a car that hates you this month I'd want to expose and clean and inspect as much of the front end as possible in case you got other stuff that needs to be fixed. I'd also consider replacing your AC condenser at the same time if its beat up enough.
Camper your my wife’s favorite replier in general. Since you are agreeing with what she told me we were going to do you may be elevated even higher lol we removed the bumper and advice for anyone, get it the heck out of the way. Got everything out and back in in 3 hours with no bumper and didn’t need to even remove the air box or other things inside the engine bay. We did use standard ramps with wood planks to get clearance to get underneath for the passenger lower hose, everything else was from the top
