Hello everyone!

I have a slight problem, I haven't found it to be E55 specific, but I read about a possible solution on the MB world 190e forum and one of the Gx forums.

Problem: I believe I have something going on with my blower motor or the resistor. Recently when I have my blower motor running I get this burning plastic smell in the cabin. Then today I noticed my cabin air filter cover is starting to turn white and at one point I had a lot of smoke? (Yes smoke) come through my air vents. It was definitely a burnt Plastic smell.

Anyone have any ideas? I want to be sure before I start ripping stuff apart.

What I've tried: I removed my cabin air filter cover and the filter. The filter is clean, it does have that burnt Plastic smell though. There were no leaves in the blower motor, I did however find a little tree, so maybe the previous owner had this issue before or he was trying to make the inside of the car smell better? It looked pretty old. Anyway, other than that, the motor spins, no binding, and I didn't see anything that looked like it was burning.

Could something be up with the battery that's right there? I didn't even know the car had a 3rd battery lmao.

Thank you for the help!


I also posted this on a few of the FB groups as well!

 

Does the auxiliary heater still give you nearly instantaneous heat output when the engine is cold? I'm wondering if your heating element let out the magic smoke.
Or perhaps something was ingested an is now cooking against said element...

 

​​It does not, however I did some minor diagnosing myself. Yesterday I drove around with the AC set to 60F° and drove the car for roughly 45-60 minutes and eventually I got the white smoke through the vents and the burning plastic smell again. Since I didn't use the heater at all this is leading me to believe it's the blow motor resistor. From what I can see from the cabin air filter area, the squirrel cage doesn't look dirty, so I think at least the motor it self has been replaced