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I’m posting this so that hopefully other people who own a Ford Focus will find this. Over the weekend the windscreen washers on my Focus stopped working. This was a bit of a bugger given the crappy weather so on Sunday I pulled it apart and removed the switch as a prime suspect. A bit of digging and some posts on some Focus owner club sites soon began to point to the switch as a fairly common failure (although not usually quite how mine was failing).

If anyone reading this is having problems with the washer switch on their focus then first, check the pump. Easily done as the same pump does the front and rear washers. It is highly unlikely to run in one direction but not the other. Assuming you can hear it (it is under the nearside wing) then take the switch off. This is actually surprisingly simple. Lower the steering wheel right down and pull it towards you if you sit in the drivers seat. On each side of the plastic cover on the top of the steering column there are two small clips. Push something small into these (small screwdriver - I found the car key actually worked ok) and the top of the column cover will lift off. Once that it removed you can see the two switches (lights, wipers) and can push the small clip on the top of the suspect switch. It should then lift out. Remove it from the loom by pushing the small plastic catch on the multiplug and pulling the plug out. This is probably the trickiest bit of th job!

To test the switch check out that *without* the button for the washers pressed you have continuity between pins 6 and 2 and open circuit between pins 2 and 3. this should switch when the button is pressed. I found that on mine 2 and 3 were open circuit regardless of the switch position.

If this is the case then you have a knackered switch. Assuming that you don’t have the switch with the 6 intermittent speed settings check out the plug on the loom in the car. If you have wires going to *all* 10 ways (not just 10 wires - make sure one goes to each pin) in the plug then you can save a little cash and get an upgrade at the same time :-). Get down to the ford dealer and ask for part# 1097542. This is the switch from the Mk3 mondeo apparantly so don’t give them the reg number of your focus (they will press for it) - just ask for the part. Get it (I paid £30.22 + VAT for mine) and plug it in. All should now work

The advantages of getting this part is that a) it’s actually cheaper for some odd reason and b) you should now have variable delay on the intermittent wipe. Bonus! The whole thing should take less than 10 mins.

Hopefully someone will stumble across this info and save themselves hours of trawling around the web looking for snippets of info

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 29th, 2005 at 8:55 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.