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I finished replacing the seat heater elements on my driver seat over the weekend and wanted to post a bit of the process to replace them. It took me less than 3 hours, including a break for dinner. In my post under the topic Heated seats not working, page 14 I posted about my troubleshooting using PIT543A (Diagnostic Tips – Front Heated Seats). In brief, I went through the troubleshooting steps and identified the problem as both of my heating elements that were impeding with too much resistance to function. I have a 2014 Crew Cab SLT with Heated and Cooled seats and the safety seat vibrator. The part numbers I ordered were 23170194 and 23223775. They were perfect replacements, and I could also tell that there were some minor updates I could see from my originals. Hopefully GM has fixed the garbage heaters that were installed originally and this time they’ll last a lot longer. The heating pads have the cooling layer built-in to allow the seat venting to blow through the seat. The heating element is covered by a felt material that sits right against the leather. Under that is the layer for the ventilation material, which feels a lot like bubble wrap and allows the air to flow out through nickel sized holes spaced around the heating pad layer. So contrary to some reports from dealers trying to explain poor performance, the heating element is directly against the leather… the venting layer is thus under the heating layer. On to the actual work. The first step to the repair was removing the seat. Take the headrest off, it'll be easier to if you just get it out of the way right away. Removing the rigid seat back is easy, and you can follow PI1091 for more info on that. There are only 2 T50 bolts holding the seat in place. Remove the plastic trim covering the seat tracks, and move the seat forward enough to get access to the bolts at the rear of the tracks. With the trim removed, you can break the bolts loose and remove them. I read this next tip online, but disconnect the negative battery lead before removing the big yellow and grey wire connector that you can now see with the trim removed. That way you avoid potentially, yet unlikely, causing an air bag light to come on in your dash that your dealer would have to reset. Slide the red safety tab back on the connector, then rotate the grey latch to disengage the connector. This is the only connector going between the seat itself and the vehicle body. At this point I took off all the seat trim I could get to. The trim piece with the power seat controls has a hidden philips screw that is on the lower front of the seat that you have to get to from behind the trim. Otherwise, all the other trim has visible screws. Next, remove the seat belt anchor (another T50 bolt). You'll have to take off another piece of seat trim covering the pretensioner assembly, and disconnect a wire that runs to the seat belt pretensioner trigger. The pretensioner wire comes off by first prying up on the red safety tab, and then it just lifts straight off.

So I have a 05 CCSB Z71 with cloth seats and no seat heaters. I live in Alaska and seat heaters are much appreciated up here. I've done a bit of research and it seems like more hassle than it's worth to try to use the stock heater controls mounted on the door because I won't have the necessary wiring without the LT seats (is that right?). Anyways, I've been looking at universal kits and it seems like they're poorly suited to the seat design with the velcro down the middle and such. My question is whether I could pay the extra money for the GM heater pads but use a generic switch and relay setup. Would that work?