How to Replace Cooling Fan Assembly 2003-12 Volvo XC90

Hey friends, it's Len here at 1A Auto. Today we're working on our 2004 Volvo XC90. This is the all wheel drive version. And I'm going to be removing the cooling fan assembly. Going to be super easy. I can do it, you can do it, too. As always, if you need any parts, you can always check us out 1AAuto.com. Thanks.

So now what we're going to do, now that the hood's up, we're just going to open up this right here. This is your coolant reservoir. You want to make sure that your cooling is not hot. This vehicle's been sitting for a while, so I'm not worried about it. We'll set the cap aside and we can move along. So now that we're underneath the vehicle, what we're going to do is we're going to try and get this out of here, so we can get to the radiator that's located right here.

Going to be very easy. Going to use a 14 millimeter. We're going to take out this bolt, this bolt, there's one hiding up in here. And then the same thing for the other side of the vehicle, all 14s. Got my airgun, 14 millimeter, can use a ratchet if you want. Here's what my bolts look like. There's two long ones and then the other four look the same. The two long ones, where of course, the two that were hiding. So we'll set this stuff aside. We can move along to the next step.

So I grabbed a rubber mallet just in case I need it, because what we need to do these arms right here, they kind of have like, almost like this that goes right up here. So we need to do is get this to go forward and then come undone, and then come out. So I'm just getting some my rubber mallet. Just give it a couple bonks. Try to lift up. Just getting it to move's the hard part here, because the way that these hooks are. There it is. Almost. Come on baby. There we are. We got this out of here. Let's move ahead to the next step.

So we've got our recycling receptacle here, it's ready to catch the coolant that's going to come out. Now what we need to do is drain the coolant. We're going to come right up here, get a little petcock area. We're going to turn this counter-clockwise, that's to the left with our 13 millimeter socket. And we should have coolant get ready to come out of this. Getting close here. Probably going to make a mess. Safety glasses. Hand protection. Here we go. There we are. Cool. We'll just let this do its thing, and we'll move along.

So now that we have the coolant drained, we're going to move along. We're going to take out this bolt right here, and this one right here. So we'll grab our 10 millimeter. That's what our bolt looks like. This bolt right here just goes down through this plate and it goes in, and this shaft right here kind of goes into a slot in the radiator, keeps it from moving around. There's those two bolts. They're both the exact same. We can set these aside, move along.

So now we're going to take the clamp off of the upper radiator hose to the radiator. To do that, I'm going to use a seven millimeter socket and my quarter inch ratchet. If you think you can do it with a screwdriver, you can also try it with a flat head screwdriver. With these clamps, you don't have to loosen them up all the way, to the point that they come apart. You just loosen them up enough so you can slide them up the hose a little bit and you can get the hose off of the radiator. That feels pretty loose. Just grab the hose, give it a wiggle. Here we are. There's our clamp. This one looks like it's reusable. If you don't think it is, then you'd want to replace it. This one looks decent. I'll set it aside. Onto the next step.

So we're going to remove this 10 millimeter headed bolt and this 10 millimeter headed bolt. That's going to make it so we can move this out of our way. Both are the exact same. We'll set these aside and we'll reuse them later. We'll grab this, give a little wiggle. Just got this end right here, which slides into the box. Air comes up through here, into your air box, goes through the air filter and into the intake. We'll set this aside. So now that we've got that out of the way, we're just going to come over here. We're going to take off whatever we can off of our fan shroud unit here.

Just get that unclipped. There's another clip down lower. It looks like it's a little harder to get to. I'm just going to use this forkey tool and it's going to essentially go around the clip, and then I'm going to pop it up. There it is. That's loose. Get that out of the way. I've got some wiring here. Looks like we're just going to grab right here. Give it a squeeze, lift it straight up. We always take a look at our electrical connectors. Make sure there's no funny colors in there. Anything besides metal color is not so great, in which case you'd want to get a terminal cleaning kit. This one looks fine, so we'll just set that aside for now.

Going to come across the top up here, this clip off of here. Come across, this clip, should be able to get this under there. There we go. This one. Come on. Oh yeah, we are cruising. This one. Cool. So we get this right here. Got a little push tab. We're going to squeeze it, separate these two. There we are. Take a look at our connector. Looks great. Looks great. Set this stuff aside. Following this one down, looks like it goes down and a way so it's not connected to the radiator shroud at all, or a fan shroud, I should say. So now we're just going to spray down the lines. This area right here where the line goes in and then the same on the lower side, just a little bit of penetrant goes a long way here. It's going to help us out down the line.

We'll let that do its job and we'll continue with ours. So I'm going to go for my 10 millimeter bolt. My tool on there. So, I'm unscrewing it from right back here. There we are. Get my tool out of here. There's our bolt, very long. I'll probably clean this up before I go ahead and put it back in there. We'll set this aside. We'll do the other side of the vehicle. It's right down in here. It's the same thing, 10 millimeter. Bolt number two, looks the same as the first, in exception of well, it's just not rusted up. No big deal. We'll set this aside with the other one, and we can move along to the next step.

So we've got our line that goes into the radiator. There's a little green clip here. The way these work is you squeeze the tabs, something like that, and then you should be able to grab the line at the same time as those tabs being squeezed, wiggle and pull at the same time and it should want to slide out of the radiator. So let's give that a try. Get this stuff out of the way. See about grabbing that. There we are. Set that aside. We'll do the same to the other hose. All right, so I'm grabbing this lower hose here. I'm giving it a twist. It moves around fairly easily, so that's always nice if it doesn't, just spray it again and keep trying to wiggle it. Get my flashlight down there.

I'm going to squeeze those two green clips or ears on the clip, and I'm going to try to pull this out. There we are. Came right out. A little bit oil comes out, it goes right into our collection bucket there. So we're going to take off this lower clamp right here, and that's for the lower radiator hose to the radiator. I'm just going to use my flathead. Going to get this fairly loose. I don't want to keep going until the clamp comes completely apart. It's not about that, it's just getting it loose from the hose so I can move it and I can get the hose off of the radiator, that's all I need to do.

There we are. Slide that up and out of the way. We know we got plenty of room there. Let's go like this. We might have coolant coming out, you know even though we drained it, you never really know. So of course, hand protection, eye protection, super important and keep your mouth closed while you do this. There it is. Wipe off of there. We're going to use a T27 to remove this bolt right here. That's what the tool looks like. It's a little star. Get it on there. This is the bracket that holds this line still. Get that bolt out of there. We'll set it aside.

Just give this thing a little wiggle. So now we have a 10 millimeter over here. We have another 10 millimeter over here, and then of course the ones over on the other side. So let's grab a 10, and we'll continue. Use my 10 up here. It doesn't give me very much room for our ratchet with a socket. If you have a ratcheting wrench, might come in handy, or even just a regular wrench I guess, but that would take quite a while probably. So this line right here, it's just in a little clamp that goes like this. The line comes up through. I'm going to try to pop that out of there. There we are.

That's going to give us a little bit more room to get in here with our 10 millimeter. We're just going to continue so we get this bolt all the way out. This bolt's almost ready to come out. There we are. So we're actually going to take that bolt and I'm just going to put it in a thread or two here, and that's just a hold this from moving around so I can take the other bolt out on the other side there. So there's another 10 millimeter bolt here. The reason why I put the bolt in on the other side is just so this thing isn't flopping around. It makes this a little bit easier for me.

This bolt's out. Once we take this out, this is going to be able to flop down. This is going to be able to flop down. So watch your face, make sure you're wearing your eye protection. Safety first is the number one concern here at 1A Auto. Bolt number two, let these down nice and easy here. There we are. There's our two bolts. They're the exact same. We'll set these aside and we'll continue. So you've got this plastic thing right here on the passenger side of the radiator, directly above it, here's another 10 millimeter head bolt that holds your AC condenser to the radiator. I'm just going to remove that bolt using a 10 millimeter. There we go.

Just get this bolt out of here, should just slide right through. There's our bolt. So we made our way over to the driver's side now. We're going to do the same thing, remove the 10 millimeter bolt that goes through the condenser. I want to be careful for any dripping fluids. The side would have oil and coolant dripping down. So wear your eye protection, and your hand protection. Get this bolt out of here. I'm assuming it should look like the first, just wiggle stuff around. All right, so here's the bolt from the left side. Looks the same as the passenger, so we'll just set it aside with the other one.

So we've got one bolt right here and then one over on the driver's side, and those are going to be the last two bolts that are holding this radiator in. Aside from that, there might be a little bit of finagling that's going to go on to try to get the ears on the radiator to maneuver around other things. So I'm going to use my 12 millimeter socket, and I just got it on an air gun. But you can use a ratchet if you need to. That's what our bolt looks like. We'll set this aside. Driver's side, same thing.

So everything's working its way down here. So I'm going to leave this in. I'm going to grab something to support this real quick. So I went and grabbed a pole jack here. You can use whatever you've got, but essentially all I'm doing is applying very light pressure to the AC condenser over here and to the turbo inner cooler. Literally no pressure, I'm not crushing it or anything, I'm just kind of holding it up. So when I take out this last bolt for the radiator, the radiator is going to want to come down and the inter cooler and the AC condenser will want to stay up. Going back to using my 12 millimeter here. Oops. Throw that there.

There's our bolt, looks exact same as the one on the passenger side. So we'll put them together as a pair. We're just going to wiggle it around. I'm going to drain out the rest of this coolant real quick into our recycling receptacle. We'll wait for that to finish up and then we'll continue. So here we go. I'm just going to continue wiggling this thing around. We're going to move this out of the way. Oops. Get some more coolant coming down, that's nice. That's special. You can think you have all the coolant out. Let me see if I can get this out of the way.

So let's let this down a little bit here. That's going to give us a little bit of wiggle room for everything that's going to be happening here. We're going to get our safety glasses on, make sure we're safe. Safety is the number one concern here at 1A Auto. And we're just going to see if we can wiggle the radiator down past the inner cooler, this relentless amount of coolant that's coming out of this.

All right, so now that we've got the radiator down a little bit, and the fan shroud, we can see up here we've got our hose. This is an overflow hose. Comes all the way up here, and connects into your reservoir. So we want to make sure that we have this separated so when we lower the radiator down further, it won't be hanging from this essentially. And it can be easy to forget this because while the radiators mounted in, this is underneath this, right here, and it's impossible to see and get to.

Pull that up like that. Work on it in my terms here, which is up where I'm comfortable. Slide that all the way up there out of the way. Get my flashlight out of your way. I'm just going to twist the two hoses, separate them. Here we are. Take a look at the hose doesn't look cracked. I'd say it's reusable. Set this aside and put it right up where we can find it and make sure that we put it back together. Get the other end of the hose that can just do whatever it wants to do. All right, now what we're going to do, we're going to remove this bolt right here and then the other one on the other side of the fan shroud, all the way over here. And that's going to make it so we can lift the fan shroud up and away from the radiator and get that out of the way.

I'm just going to get our light over here. I've got my 10 millimeter. There's our bolt. Nothing too special about it. We'll set it aside. Now we're going to do the same to this side over here. So we've got all this stuff right here. Just try to push it out of your way. We don't want it to get caught on anything. Now we're just going to grab the fan shroud and try to pull it up maybe about half an inch to an inch. Slide it away. On the bottom of the radiator, or the lower end of the radiator, you got like these little hooky dos that go like this and then your fan shroud just goes, sits in there just like that.

So it's kind of latched in down here just by sitting there, and then up top is where those two bolts were that we just took out. Now that we took those out, we'll slide the radiator, I mean the fan shroud, up and then slide it away from the radiator and then we can take it out of there. And so we'll just lift it up. There we are. If it's easier, you could try to go back underneath now and because what we need to do is lift it up, and then also move it away from the radiator. There it is. That just slid down quite a bit. This side slid down quite a bit as well.

Cool beans. All right, let's go back underneath and we'll get it out of there. We're back underneath. As you can tell, the fan shroud's making its way down like we were hoping that it would. There's a little catch on the radiator, on the side. So I'm just going to go like that, and I'm going to help the fan shroud come down by pressing the radiator towards the front of the vehicle, and pulling the cooling fan down. Get this hose is holding us up. There's our fan. We'll set this aside.

We're going to grab our fan shroud. We're going to do the bolt side up, and then of course these areas right here, that's going to go into the hooks on the radiator once we get it up in there. All right. There we are. Cool. So here's that piece. That needs to go right down inside here, so it's not completely set in there yet. So I'm just going to kind of try to wiggle it around, see if I can get it so it's lined up. It needs to be lined up on both sides to slide in right. So this side just slid in, and this side has to be close at this point. There it is. That's in. We'll double check this side. Yup. It's in, feels good. Cool. All right, let's bring the vehicle down. We're going to put it in the mounting bolts for the top of the fan to the radiator, and then we'll go ahead and put this up.

So now we're going to take our bolts. We have one that looks just like it from the driver's side as well. It's going to go right through the fan assembly there. And then into the little clip we just put in there. Get that started. Do the same thing to the driver's side. Both of these are started in, so now we're just going to go ahead and snug these right up. I'm using my 10 millimeter. That's bottomed out. Just give it a teeny bit more and off to the driver's side, same thing. Snug it, teeny bit more, onto the next step. There we are, bottomed, teeny bit, that off of there. Very nice.

So we've got this, it's just going to go right on here. We'll grab our clamp, its made its way all the way down over there. Bring it up here. We're going to get this settled back in, right to where it belonged. You can see where it was before. That's where I'm going to line it up with now. So I'm going to use this right here. Squeeze on my clamp. Watch your fingers, of course, because these clamps are spring clamps, and they like to snap on you. Give you a little pinch. That'll wake you up for sure. Looks like I can turn it a little bit. There we are. That looks pretty great. Very nice. This is going to come right along here. It's going to sit inside this right here on your fan housing.

You can see where the marks are on the hose. So just slide it in there. This one, just slide it in. There we are. It can't go anywhere now. We can move along to the next step. I've got my mounting bolts here. I'm just going to start lifting everything up and try to get it up to where it's going to go. I'll actually grab my pole jack, well let's try it by hand first real quick, see if we can get it to play nice. And if not, we'll grab a jack of some sort, I'll probably grab my pole jack. But if you're working on the ground, which will be pretty much impossible for this job. You can just use whatever you've got, maybe a regular jack or something.

Need to get my bolt lined up with my hole there. So I'm just going to use my pole jack here. Slowly bring this up. If it feels like it's binding on anything, of course I'll slow down. Feels like I still got plenty to go here, so I'm not worried about that. This is just going to make it easier for me to get my bolts up in there. Let the pole jack do all the hard work here. Little wiggle. It's getting a little stiffer now. So let's just figure out what's holding us up, because that looks like it's pretty close to wanting to go in. This needs to come down. Let's see. So these two pieces stay exactly like that. We just need the radiator to be able to go up a little bit higher. There it is. Cool.

Just get the holes lined up. That feels pretty good. We'll grab the other bolt for the other side. Looks pretty good over here too, that's nice. There we are. We'll get these up in there a little bit more and we won't tighten them down yet till we get everything else situated and then we'll go about tightening everything up at once. That one's still loose, but up there. This one. There's something on there. Let this down. We'll just set this aside. We can move along. So we've got our bolt. I'm going to try to bring it through this hole, through the hole that's through here, and then into the nutted end that's on the AC condenser.

You might have to wiggle everything around a little bit. Just see if we can get it to work for us. All right. Get that bolt started in good. We're just going to do the same to the other side, and then we'll snug them up. All right, it's getting pretty snuck here. There it is. It's bottomed out. Just give it a teeny bit more. That one's tight. We'll do the same to the driver's side. That's snug. Let's give it a teeny bit more. That's that. Let's move along to the next step. We're going to go ahead and snug up this bolt right here. It's a 12 millimeter. Do the same to the passenger side. Tight. Let's move along.

All right, so we're just going to line this up. Make sure it lines up with the nut certs there that we put in. Looks like if I line that one up, this one's too far in, and vice versa, so we're just going to try and get them lined up. If they don't line up, you could just use a screwdriver, give it a nice little bonk, just push them a little bit, so they're wherever they need to be to line up. Once you have these lined up, which it looks like they are pretty well, grab the power steering cooler here, this is going to go up as well. It goes on the outside. The hose is up inside the bumper there. Get one of my bolts, can pick whichever side you want to start with. You do you, booboo. I'm just going to go with this one.

Get that started. We're going to do the same to this side, there. All right, now that we have both those started, we can go ahead and snug them up. We're going to use our 10 millimeter. You can use a ratchet, or whatever you've got, but it's 10 millimeter. It's bottomed out, a teeny bit. Onto the next side. The same thing over here. It's bottomed out. Give it a little bit more. Both those bolts are tight. You can move on to the next step. So now we're going to install this bolt right here, it's the torx one. You're going to use your T27, it just goes right in the side of the radiator right here and holds these lines secure.

Just get it lined up. Start it in there. Use my T27, that's bottomed out. There we are. That's tight. All right, so we're just going to clean up our oil cooler line here. We'll get so these gaskets are nice and clean. There we are. Looks pretty good. Try to clean up this green locking clip here, just for good practice. This line right here is going to go right inside this, which is right above where the lower hose goes into. Going to be very easy. Bring it around, lined it up with your hole, give it a little wiggle.

Now what I'm doing is I'm trying to squeeze it and push it in and I'm going to try to get it so that little ear of this is bottomed out against this end of the plastic, and these little clippy dos are inside there. There we are. Just make sure, I'm going to give it a little wiggle here. Now I'm going to give it a tug. Oh, yeah, tight. All right, so we got this cooler line from up top now, just like the lower one. We're going to clean it off so it looks nice. Check the gaskets. Those still look great.

The radiator still got its little plug in it. I'm just going to take this same as the lower part. Just going to work it in there. Give it a little wiggle, make sure it's rotating nice. Give it a nice tug. Make sure it's locked in there. Very nice. We've got our electrical connector here. We've got our two locking ends. Just going to clip it in. It's going to go right here. We're going to take this one, it's going to go right up in here. It's kind of hiding. You might forget that it's there. We've got our electrical connectors, bring this around, put it there. This right here, here. It's going to go right down there. You can see you got the big, widely separated prongs and then the smaller ones, it's going to match up inside here.

The smaller ones basically face towards the engine, and the bigger, wider separated ones are towards the front of the vehicle. This just tucks right in here, just like that. That's very nice. All right, I'm just going to get my hose clamps started on here, so it's close to where it needs to be. Bring our lower hose up. Going to get it onto the lower portion of the radiator there. Slides right on. All right, just slide right over that. Once again, you want to make sure it's flush. Make sure your hose is all the way up against the radiator as far as it can go, and make sure when you put your clamp on, you don't have it very close to the edge and you also don't have it past the edge of the tubing that comes out of the radiator.

That looks pretty good right about there. I'm just going to snug this right up. Tight. Just putting a little bit of Copper Never Seize on there. It's going to help it come off down the line. So on the skid plate, you've got these little pitons that come down into right in between here. And so this part right here sits up on the sub frame area, right up here, so that piton's going to come up and then sit down into its groove right up along the top up there. So if you're struggling and you're getting it over, but it's just not doing it thing, it's because that thing needs to slide down in right there.

All right, so let's get this up here. I'm going to go at an angle. I'm going to try to do one side at a time. Under there, up over that, bring this around, up this way. Give that a little push. Bonk. There we are. Those little pitons came right down into the sub frame like what we wanted them to do. All of our bolt holes are lined up. Let's grab some bolts and get it in. Alright, so we've got our bolts, we've got four of these, two of these. These two are the same, there the same as those two over there. Just get those in. Just going to start all these in. We're not going to tighten anything down until they're all started.

I'm going to use a 14 with my extension, just so I can get up in here. Now that they're all started, we'll go ahead and tighten them down. All right, all six are tight. Easy peasy. All right, so we have our air dam. This is where the air gets pulled in, right up through here, into the air box, filtered, metered, drawn into the engine, burnt. This is super important. You need to make sure you put it back in. There's a slot where this square connects into in the bottom of the box. Same place we took it out of. That's where it's going to go in. Slides right in. Just like that. Take your two bolts. Now that we haven't both started. We'll go ahead and snug them up. There we are. Easy peasy. O

So when we're filling the coolant, generally speaking, you'd want to apply vacuum add coolant that way because that'll make it so it draws coolant into all the areas inside the cooling system. If you don't have access to a vacuum system to be able to fill the coolant, you're just going to have to slowly top it off. It's going to work its way in. Once it gets up, so it looks like it's full, run the vehicle for a little bit. It's going to draw down. Just keep adding. Make sure you're wearing safety glasses as you're doing it. Once it gets hot, anything could happen in there.

You're going to want to run it for a little while because it's going to burp out a lot of air through this system. There's the heater core, you got all your coolant hoses, you get the inside of the engine, all sorts of areas where this coolants going to need to go. Easy peasy.

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