How to Replace Heater Control Module 1994-2002 Dodge Ram 1500

Hey, friends. It's Len here at 1A Auto. Today I'm going to be working on our 1996 Dodge Ram 1500. I want to show you something fairly basic, replacing the heater control module. It'd be super simple. I can do it and you can do it too. As always, if you need this or any other part, check us out 1AAuto.com. Thanks.

Okay, friends, so we're inside the vehicle. We have a clear view of our dash plate here. Plastic, and give it a little tug. The majority of it will break free just like that. Okay? But you'll notice as you get along to this side, it seems like it's kind of stuck in there, isn't it? It's not that big of a deal. Let's grab this, pull it out of here. You're going to notice you have a Phillips head and a Phillips head. We'll remove those, one, two. Both of those are the same. Put those where we can't lose them. Pull this right out of here.

There's going to be a couple more screws up here. These ones are a little bit harder to get to, but can be done. Same as the others. There's one on this side, of course. Pull out this whole unit here. That's our little cup holder tray. Awesome. All right, so now we're just going to run our fingers along the side. Awesome. Pardon the noise. Get that out of the way. This should lift right up. Awesome. Let's get a little bit of wiring here. Disconnect that one.

So now we'll just take this off, just grab this little tab and this little tab. Come on baby. I lift one and the other one goes on there. Oh. Okay. And there's that. Awesome. Let's get this out of the way. So we have four mounting screws. One, two, three, four. We're going to remove those using an Allen head. Get it on there. There's all our screws, well, minus one. They were all there. Here, they're back. Awesome. We'll put these aside.
You grab the heater control unit here. Just pull it out straight like this. All right. This part is going to be a little harder for you to see, slash me. So we have the control unit. We're going to take this connector out right here.

To do that, we're just going to push right on that tab and slide this out. Just right there. It unlocks this, it comes out from there. All right, so we're just going to lift up on this little clip, slide that connector out. It comes off easy peasy. There it is. Just take a peek, make sure you don't see any funny colors in any of these electrical connectors were taken off.

We're going to take off this right here, the cable. To do that, right on the bottom, you got a little squeeze tab. You're going to squeeze it and lift it up and out. And this part right here, comes right out like that. Awesome. We're cruising right along. Let's find the other end of these, which is going to be underneath the dash and we can continue.

All right, so we're just going to grab our connector that's down under here. It's right here. All right. We can tell because when we give this a tug, our unit moves around. You got a little pull tab right there, and then another one on the other side. We're going to separate those and then separate these two lines. All right, just got to separate the two here. Looks like it should be starting to get ready to come off. Everything's super sticky down here. I don't know what they wrap it with, but it's definitely a pain in the butt to separate.

Here we go. Almost there, come on. I don't play no games. There it is. Awesome. Let's get our connector out of here. This is the one that's part of the truck, so we'll leave that alone and we're going to be plugging our new one right into that. So we'll just grab this, bring it right out of here. Nice little tug. Here we are, friends, heater control module.

So, here we are friends--a quick product comparison for you. Right here we have our heater control module out of our 1996 Dodge Ram 1500, over here we have our brand new, quality 1A Auto Part. These parts, when you hold them up next to each other, they have the same mounting holes, same switches, super important. The back, also the same. Let's get these wires out of the way so you can see, hopefully. Awesome. You got your electrical connector here, same, here, here. Yep. Everything's the same. Got your area for where your cable goes into. Everything's right there. That said, I don't see any reason why this wouldn't be a quality part to install into the vehicle, so I'm going to go ahead and do it. As always, if you need this or any other part, check us out 1AAuto.com. Thanks.

So we're going to take our connection and we're going to bring it all the way down so it's hanging out down there for us. You can imagine what I'm doing, essentially just bringing this so it's going to be waiting for us down at the bottom so we can plug it in. Awesome. So that's down there. We're going to take our cable, all right, you get this right here, we'll get that in. It'll be super simple. Take this little doodad, put it in there. This red thing, same. Let's see. Oh, so if you turn this, it brings this up and down. So if you notice that your red thing isn't connecting in where you need it to, just go ahead and turn this, and then that's going to make it so the cable can move.

I'm going to grab our little connector here, I'm going to plug it into the bottom slot exactly where we took it out from. Nice. Let me grab this, slide it right in right here. Mm-hmm (affirmative). Give it a nice tug, that feels great. That's everything for the back there. I'm just going to slide this into place. I'm going to grab our four mounting screws and then we can continue.

So we've got our four mounting screws. We're going to start these into all four corners. Once they're all started we can go ahead and snug them up. Awesome. Snug. There we are. All right, let's get down bottom, finish it up.

All right, let's get this connected in. We've got the connector from the truck and we have the connector from our quality 1A Auto part. Put these two together, they just kind of slide right in. And lock in. Awesome. You definitely want to make sure you have it locked in. This feels great. If anything's hanging down, you can just go ahead and button it up now. Now would be a perfect time to do it. Aside from that, we can go ahead and get our face plate back on.

All right, so it's time to get our face plate on. I'm just going to go right over here. Just bring it down, we'll rest it there for a second. Come right over here. We'll connect this in. It's very basic, you just line it up, give it a squeeze, it locks right in. We've got this one. Go right like that. That slides in, easy peasy. Take the face plate, carefully line it up with where it belongs. That looks pretty great. Give it a loving bonk. Love it. Let's get a couple screws in. We can move along.

All right, so let's get this in here. Just going to slide it in. Theoretically, it should want to just go in there. Two mounting screws. Some people call it an ashtray, it's more of a change tray for me, but everybody's got their thing. Awesome. All right, so we've got our cup holder. You've got the little tab right here, that tab has to go under this, right here. So as you slide this in, you need to just pay attention to the bottom. That looks pretty good. It looks as though the screw holes are lined up. That's great. Oops, they were lined up. Try it again. Just got to get that in there. Get that one started, do this one over here. Well, they're started, let's snug them up. Awesome.

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