Blower Motor Noises

[Deyomatic]

I've had my 2010 MS3 for a couple of years now. Back in the winter I turned on the heater and I heard an annoying "baseball card in the spokes" type clicking noise that was too loud to ignore. It went away on its own after playing with the fan speed. It's happened several times since then. I found on another forum that you could remove/replace the cabin air filter and vacuum out that plenum and it will go away. I did that, and while I was surprised with how much debris was in there, I was happy with the result...for 400miles and the noise returned. It's been like this every 4-500 miles since then. It's getting really annoying to have to keep taking out the filter every month.
I stopped into a local dealership the other day and they said that when cars come in with that issue, they remove the blower and clean out the whole system.

Has anyone else out there had this recurring problem? How did you fix it?

 

[digi0123]

It sounds similar to what I had to deal with at around 20k on the car. Turned out to be the blower motor itself needed to be replaced. You wouldn't hear it when the fan was on full blast, but at lower speeds it sounded like you had a playing card flapping in bike spokes. The positive is it was warranty, the negative the dash makes a little noise.........cars only fit together once......

 

[Deyomatic]

Mine actually turned out to be a combination of trash getting into the cabin air intake (I believe through the windshield wiper holes- since the holes are so much larger than the posts) and the fact that the mice didn't hold up their end of the deal and confine themselves to places that they can't cause much damage (a state of war now exists between myself and Mousedom). My engine air cleaner was FULL of acorns and remnants of an old blue blanket I had stored in the garage, (this car sits outside the garage) and the engine air filter itself was TRASHED- acorns sucked up inside the folds- 5 of those folds were chewed through. Miraculously nothing was damaged. I have since taken the front plastic snorkel off and put some of that 1/2" wire screen in between two of the connections, and placed a K&N Filter (I figured they wouldn't eat the oiled cotton) in the stock airbox.

The aforementioned dealership removed the HVAC blower and all my ductwork and cleaned it all out for $76. That sounded like the deal of a century to me. They said it was full of nesting material. I have placed snap traps all around my garage.