Car Window Stuck Down - How to Fix Power Window

Hey, everyone. It's Len from 1A Auto. Today I'm going to be showing you how to put your window back up if it happens to go down and you can't get it up. Maybe it's your switch or maybe it's your motor. It needs to be diagnosed but until you can get it into your shop or watch my video, you want to put it back up. I'm going to show you how to do it. If you need to get any parts for your vehicle, you can always come to 1aauto.com and check us out.

All right everyone. So today we're going to try to solve an issue with the window being able to go down but not up. There's couple of different things we can check. You can tell it goes down, but then it doesn't want to go back up. So we're going to try to do a little bit of diagnosing, and there's a couple of different areas we can check and I'm going to talk you through it.

So now what I'm going to do, if you have access to a wire, you can hook up a little rig like this, little twisty-do on there. And you're going to go into the wiring connections on the inside of where the motor is, hook it over the inside, or the furthest one in towards the window, little prong. Sorry if my hands are in your way. And this is going to be our ground wire. I'm going to keep my fingers out from inside the door panel. Now here's where the fun part comes in--making sure that we're safe. We have safety glasses on in case anything goes wrong, we have our hands away from the door panel. Any metal lines are right over here, we're going to take our little power probe if you happen to have one. Juice it up. We know it works.

We're going to touch this on the other prong that's in there. There's only two. We've got one on the ground, and we're going to put it on the other one. We know it's making a connection. We're going to power this up, and now we've brought our window up. We'll remove that wire. We'll reconnect this because well why not? And now we've got our window up.

So now what I would do is I would continue my diagnosing to figure out why the window wouldn't go up because we know that the motor works both directions, so we just diagnosed that this motor is in good working condition. So we'd have to continue our diagnosis and go from there. So now that we've diagnosed that our motor is in good working condition. We're going to make sure that it still continues to not work properly. It goes down--not up. So now our next step would be to try to test or replace this switch right here.

All right now we have another window switch. Known working one. We're going to go ahead and plug it in. Hear the click noise. See if this puppy works. Up, down. Alright, so now that we have our window going, goes up and down, a couple of things I wanted to mention that if you had a window that works going up and down but for some reason it happened to be slow, there's a couple of different possibilities. It could be frayed cables. This right here is your window cable, your motor turns, it pulls on this cable or pulls on this cable, which in turn makes your window go up and down. If that's frayed, it could be binding up inside here, which will cause your window to go slow. Also you'll notice there's a track right here. I'm going to keep my hands away from this. See. Comes right down. If you have a lot of gunk or build up in there, this looks good, it's nice and greased. It's clean so that looks good. We don't have an issue with this.

But you might find gunk, rust, anything in there. Rust is a common problem actually. That'll slow it down, and then lastly something that I like to mention is that inside your window tracks coming up along here, and down into your door panel on both sides. If for some reason somebody sprayed something in there, and it accumulated dirt or dust or gunk, that'll slow down the window. So those are some probable causes of that issue. But now that we've got our window going up and down, I think we're good to go from here. We'll go ahead and install that door panel, and everything should be good to go.

Alright so something else I'd like to mention is if when we were doing our testing, and we powered this up, and the motor wasn't working in either direction, and we needed to get this window up for some reason, and you didn't have access to another motor, what you could do is you can make sure that the window is in the down position, all the way down. You could take some wire cutters, and you can cut this wire right here or chord. You can cut this wire right here or chord, whatever you want to call it. Then you can make sure you have tape in hand, you can come in through here, and you could lift your window up and get it up to where you need it. Now assuming the window is all the way up, you can take some tape, and you would just go from the inside. Make a good strip coming up on over this window stripping and then back down. And you can do that numerous times coming down your window as many times as you want. At least two to three is recommended.

At that point you'd want to make sure that you order yourself a new motor, and if we did cut the cables to get the window up, you'd have to replace the whole window regulator.

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