water pump or pulley noise?

i havce a 99 cherokee and a bearing grinding sound is coming from one of the tensioner pulleys or water pump area. doesn't seem to be the power steering since there isn't a change with turning the wheel. what do you guys think? tensioner pulley or water pump more common?

Could also be the A/C compressor has a bad clutch.

take the belt off and spin all the pulleys by hand.,youll know when u got the bad one. OR becarefelul when doing this. run the car with belt on of course and use a long screwdrive and touch all non-moving areas right near each pulley.

lot of idler pulleys go bad on cherokee 6
cyl

you'll also get a nasty sound (sort of like a bearing going bad on one of the pullys, but not quite the same) if you over tighten the belt tension.

i replaced the adjustable pulley under the powersteering pump and the noise continued. maybe the pwr steering pump? the waterpump? is there anyway to tell for sure or should i just let whatever is doing it punk out and then replace it? i would have to say that the noise is deffinately coming from the drivers side of the pulley grouping.

sounds like a whirring now. there is the slightest play in the water pump's four bolt area if i try to move the pulley.

thanks guys. -c

sounds like u got it, shouldnt be any play. impellar is probbaly gone

I have a 99 Cherokee as well...experieced the same thing. Around 75K, I replaced the power steering pump and the noise got better, about a month later the noise was back. It turned out to be a bad water pump. I replaced it and it sounded like new. The water pump and power steering both went bad about a month apart. The water pump almost sounded like a bad valve...a chattering noise. It was most noticable right before shifting to second gear. When you accelerate through first gear and then let off and it shifts to second. Right when RPM's were higher, but not a lot of load on the engine. But my tensioner pully is still working fine. Hope this helps

one helpful tool for locating the source of a noise, is get a couple feet of surgical tubing and put a piece of metal in one end (cutting the handle off an old scewdriver and using the shaft works great). you can then put the open end of the tube to your ear, and touch the different components with the metal end. it works like a stethoscope and it's usuall pretty easy to tell when you have found the problem. unfotunately there isn't exactly any extra room between the motor and radiator so you wouldn't be able to reach the lower pulleys with it running.