Well, this one is a little odd.

It seems as though my radiator fan will not completely disengage. I.e. when you start the engine, it of course runs for a minute, and you can hear it when you rev the motor. Then it cuts off and the sound goes away. However when I'm driving, as I accellerate and upshift I can hear the fan spooling back down as the RPM's drop into the next gear. This wasn't happening before. I've also noticed a slight lack of power and a BIG decrease in mileage since this started going on.

Is it possible for the fan clutch to "grab" halfway or something? What even triggers that clutch? I had a small radiator leak (very small) and thought maybe a loss of fluid had a temp sensor going nuts or something, but I topped it off and it really didn't need much at all, problem still exists.

Any ideas or things to check/test? I can't afford to drop the electronic fans in yet and ditch the belt-driven one, but at this point it may be a quick/easy fix anyway.

 

there was a thread a while ago about this. in there i posted how the fan clutch works and such. it is possible (even likely) that the fan clutch is partially engaged.

check this out:
https://www.yotatech.com/forums/show...ght=fan+clutch

 

Great, thanks!

So basically if it's going bad, it will be hard to turn whether the engine is cold or not, right? (We're only getting 45-50 degrees in the daytime here, so I'm not worried about excessive heat causing it to engage really.)