P38A Blend motors

I sometimes have the wee book symbol on the a/c dashboard
Regassed at Kwik Fit about a year ago and book disappeared for a couple of weeks. They said I had a fault but couldn't tell what.
Nanocom says that I have two blend motors showing "Short fault = current"
What does a blend motor do and are they important?
Generally are they fixable or should I just fit new ones?

They blend the hot and cold air to give you the temperature you desire. If you ignore the fault they will just stay in whatever position they are in now and you will be stuck with that temperature of air coming out.

I fixed mine for a few pounds - a common problem is the feedback potentiometers, an electrical device that tells the hevac computer exactly what position the blend flap is in. They tend to wear out and stop feeding the correct symbol back. I bougth new potentiometers and just soldered them into place. It's still a pretty time-consumong task because you have to do a certain amount of dismantling to get to them, but there's less involved than if you were to replace the blend motors and my repair was significantly less expensive.

Ok that's very useful thank you.
Is it still a dashboard dismantle?

You need to take out the passenger airbag and the instrument pod to get to the motors on either side (2 on one side, one on the other). If all you are doing is replacing the pots, that can be done in-situ. These are the ones I used:

http://www.rapidonline.com/Electron...Carbon-Potentiometer-Horizontal-Mount-51-9123

They're actually cheaper than I remember - 38p plus vat each!!

I remember a thread on here once suggesting that it does them good to turn the temp right down, and then to max every so often. Keeps them working rather that being stuck in the same position. Same applies to all the air flow controls, go through them all. i think there is some auto cycle function for this too, something like every 500 starts or something like that.

I don't think that will make any difference if the fault is in the potentiometers - it's the movement that eventually wears them out. Going from hot to cold will push the pots into settings that they may not normally encounter, but a one-off movement to the extreme of their travel won't make any difference.