After driving the wife's car ('13 Fusion Ti) 4 days last week, I really love the heated seats. I could give a sh*t less about it's leather seats, but having my @ss warm in about 20 seconds dids not suck.
I started researching what it would take for me to add heated seats to my '07 Fusion, and was pleasantly surprised that they are not expensive at all. Only
$70 on Amazon Prime for two seats. I watched several how-to videos on YouTube, and it didn't look 'that bad' depending on how the seat was upholstered. I've never done any kind of upholstery before, but I knew if I had to punt it would still be OK.
So Saturday morning I started by removing the heavy as f*ck passenger seat and putting it on the bench to work on disassembly.*@#$*@#$ After surveying it for a bit,*@#$ I determined I could remove the fabric on the lower half without removing any of the plastic trim bits.*@#$ I was able to simply undo a few plastic clips and peel the fabric forward. There are grooves in the foam on either side that correlate to velcro strips sewn into the fabric. When I got to the first seam, the fabric was held in with hog rings. I clipped the hog rings and pulled the fabric further forward as seen here:
Next, I cut the heating pad to the correct length and marked the area that needed to be removed to replace the hog rings.
After the pad was cut, all the exposed edges has to be insulated with a fabric strip provided in the kit. The pad is held in place with double-sided tape and the hog rings reinstalled as seen here:
With the pad in place, I reinstalled the clips to hold the fabric and the seat cushion portion of the passenger side was done.
OK, so that part wasn't too bad so onto the back rest. I studied it for a while and determined that all the plastic bits would need to be removed to exposed the clips holding the fabric in place. These things have spring clips, push clips, and other stuff holding them in place and they are a bitch to remove without breaking anything. I finally removed the plastic panels so I could hopefully peel the fabric back. It was on very tight, but I finally managed to get it back far enough to install the pad.
When I started to measure so I could cut the pad to length, I realized the pad was too wide and would interfere with the velcro strips. The problem is the pad can only be trimmed on its horizontal axis, and just wasn't going to work. Well sh*t, I disassembled all those parts for nothing. Oh well, heated seat bottoms only for me.
By this point, suffice it to say that if I had started with the driver side, the passenger side would not have been done. I worked on running the wiring harness to the finished passenger side, reinstalled the seat in the car and called it a day.
Sunday I was back it thinking the driver side seat pad would be the same as the passenger side, but no dice. Unfortunately all of the plastic bits had to be removed along with the seat back just to allow access for the lower seat fabric to be removed...
I got the driver side heating pad installed and the seat reassembled, and moved on to finishing the wiring harness before reinstalling the seat.
After the seat was in place, I finished the wiring and mounted the switches in the bezel around the stereo. Here are a few pics showing the switches. The logo lights up and there are three LEDs which indicate high, medium, low, and off.
My thoughts now that it's done.
-After an initial test (as about an hour of use) the they don't seem to be as hot as the factory units in the wife's Fusion. I'm not sure if the fabric doesn't conduct heat as well or what, but I could never see using one of the lower settings.
After a 20 min drive this morning, I'd say the amount of heat is sufficient, but it definitely feels like it cycles off after about 15 mins. Any idea why that would be?
-In hindsight I seriously doubt I would do it again. It was a PITA, and even after completing the project, the results weren't quite as dramatic as I had hoped.
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