This may be obvious to most owners, but I learned a frustrating lesson about the wiper motor fuse today.
Northern Ohio got buried this morning with heavy snow, followed by a lot of sleet.
Like an idiot, before wiping off the car, I gave the windshield a quick swipe with the wipers. They made it about 12 inches and froze. Never moved again.
If you like swimming under water with your eyes open, that's what the rest of my day was like behind the wheel.
To make a long story short, the car's previous owner (I've had it for a week) evidently had replaced the 10-amp circuit breaker in the fuse box with a 10-amp fuse. Circuit breaker, fuse. Circuit breaker, fuse.
It's the only circuit breaker on the panel, and it's there for a reason. Of all the electrical components that benefit from having a fuse, the windshield wiper motor is the one that would trip it the most often but require maintenance attention the least often. Meaning, if it's overloaded (by snow, for example) and it trips, so what? Better to have it automatically reset through a circuit breaker than have to call attention to itself once the fuse is killed and require the headache of yet another fuse replacement.
Anyway, the moral of my frustrating lesson is: If your wiper motor circuit breaker eventually fails, spend the extra $4 and replace it with another circuit breaker. It's not a corner worth cutting.
