Recently I've been noticing either during idle or while accellerating through first gear that a 'fan' starts to run more often now than I had ever noticed. I also noticed that when I'm idle, the tach needle drops right before the fan kicks in, and it kinda stutters. It will do it over and over again every 2 minutes or so, maybe less, when I'm idle. Just the other day I also noticed that I had a battery light flash once or twice during this a few days ago. I havent seen the battery light do it anymore, but the fan is still doing its thing. Any thoughts?

*edit* I bought the car (04 mc) during the fall of last year and this is it's first texas summer (which can be ridiculous). if that makes any difference

 

Have you ck'ed the coolant level? time for a flush? the temp out side? sounds like you may need to ck the charging system also, the fan is a heavy load on the system but shoud not put on the battery light when it comes on. If the system cks out could also be the fan going bad.

 

If the fan is really noisy, it could be that your low speed cooling fan is inoperative. This just happened to me - high speed worked, but low didn't. You don't really notice anything when low speed works, since it's quiet and runs pretty frequently and stays on a while when it does come on. When this goes out, the car will use high speed only, which comes on quite noisily and only runs for about 5 seconds each time (then will stay off for 30 seconds or so and come on again). Fix requires replacement of the engine cooling fan, detailed elsewhere on NAM. This would not cause your charge light to come on, so I'd look at that issue first.

 

Exactly what I was gonna say....I've had this issue twice on the 02.

 

There is an other thread about this problem. The culprit is a voltage dropping solenoid mounted with the fan's high speed relay in the fan housing and you have to replace the whole thing ($300 or about) for a 75 cents part failing . I have been working on an alternative for a while, still running on high speed . If you run the AC the low speed fan should come on within about 30 seconds, and stay on until reaching 28 psi, then the high speed kicks in. Same with the cooling, the high speed only gets on at very high temps. When the solenoid fail, the fan only gets high speed commands from the relay, makes a high pitch noise and start/stop, start/stop for ever.

 

thanks a ton for the info guys, looks like a visit to the dealer :/

 

FWIW, I replaced my fan myself in about 3 hours. I'm pretty mechanically inclined and have worked on various cars for years, though, and had a helper and a clean garage space. It's not a complicated job, but involves taking off the front bumper and draining some of the coolant. It also takes some tools like various Torx bits and sockets on extensions.
I got my OEM replacement fan from Classic MINI in Ohio. They had a sale last month so I only paid $200, but I think regular price is closer to $300 (they do give a discount to NAM members).
There are places on the web that will sell an aftermarket version of this fan unit for less than $100, but I didn't try that and couldn't find anyone else who had either.

The true test for whether the low-speed resistor (carbonized calls it the solenoid) is burned out is this:
Open the hood and access the under hood fuse box by the air filter. The two fan relays (hi and low speeds) are in there - little grey cubes in the upper left (confirm which is which in the owner's manual or Bentley manual if you have it). Have a helper turn on the engine and then turn on the air conditioning. Hold one finger on the top of each relay, you will feel them click to activate the fan. Low speed will click first within 30 sec of turning on the A/C. If the fan does not come on when low speed relay clicks, but does come on noisily when the second (hi) relay clicks, then your low speed is definitely. Check the connector to make sure the problem isn't just a loose connection, but if results are the same you need a new fan.