which relay??!?!?!?!?!

[98'nissanowner]

well. i checked all the relays so that isnt the problem either. im going to check the radiator next.

[ctwright]

You should have at a spot for a radiator fan relay for #1, 2, and 3 but depends on the year of your Altima as to which one you are replacing. If you have only two wire plugs going to your radiator fans then it should only need the relay for radiator fan 1.

You could just check to see which relay is bad. For example, the relay should show you a diagram on the side or top.

This is what it should look like, can't draw on here so bare with me.

3----\ ----5

1--@@@--2


Terminals 3 and 5 would be your relay contacts.
Terminals 1 and 2 would be your relay coil.

The contacts are normally open for the example I just showed, which is also how they will be for the radiator fan relay. When 12 volts is applied to the coil. The contacts close.

You can check the relay by taking jumper wires with alligator clips and also an ohm's meter or multimeter.

Place a clip from one end of the jumper wire to terminal 1, the other end of that wire and clip to a ground or a positive on the battery. Take the other wire and hook one clip to terminal 2, the other to which ever you didn't hook to for the terminal 1, if you used ground, hook this one to positive, if you used positive for terminal 1, use ground for terminal 2.

Once you do this you should here a click, that was the coil energizing pulling the contacts closed. That still doesn't mean the relay is good though. The contacts may be worn and not making good contact. So, leaving the battery hooked up to the coil part of the relay, then take an ohm's meter and check for continuity between terminal 3 and terminal 5. If you do have continuity, showing 0 ohm's of resistance, the relay is good.

That relay you are checking may have different terminal numbers but you should be able to tell how to check it by comparing what I've wrote with the diagram I gave above. If the relays are good, then make sure the black wire going to your fan motor is grounded. If so, the next problem would be to look at the coolant temperature sensor, because the ecm sends power to the radiator fan relays the from the data it gets from that sensor.

Also too, you have a brown wire going to into your relay box, it is the one that has 12 volts on the coil for the relay, the computer sends the ground to it to energize the coil in the relay when car gets hot. Basically what I'm saying is, if you pull out a relay, and get a test light, you put the clip to ground, then the probe of the light to where the coil terminals go into the socket, check both of them, one of them should light up. If it doesn't you have a blown fuse probably. It's the brown wire coming from the fusebox it should be fuse number 25 in the fuse block it's a 10 amp fuse, check it.

Hope that gets you started at least I probably made some of that sound more complicated than it had to be.

[98'nissanowner]

that is a good idea, i really appriciate the advice.