I have the same issue as many other with the purple wire melting part of the socket for the rear window defroster. my main concern is why is it doing it in the first place, if I do splice it what is going to keep it from doing it again or worse cause a fire where I messed with it. electrical is not my strong suit, so any help pointing out the obvious with be appreciated

There is a fuse for the defroster I believe, You probably have a short somewhere. Check the wire.


<img src="http://www.v6z24.com/jbodyforum/images/signatures/cavalier3400z.jpg" width="319" height="199"/>

I just went to the yard and found a non melted plug and unpinned the plug and put the new plug on with lots of dielectric grease.

I bypassed it with an inline fuse I had laying around, so far so good.

Too much current for the cheap connector that GM used when they built it.

If you think that's bad... look up the Dodge connector that melts in the headlight switch.... Google 5183442AA and you'll see what I mean. Way worse...

This is the fix I found online (my apologies to the author, as I don't recall where I found it).
So far it's worked for me.

"Just finished the repair of a broken rear window defroster on a 2000 chevy cavalier.
Unit would not heat the rear window.
I could hear the relay in the dash heater control unit click and the light under the defrost button would turn on and back off after normal time out.
I suspected a bad ground, but it turned out to be a burned connector/pin in the +12v feed from the control to the rear.
The connector is located under the carpet along the left hand side of the drivers feet area, just below the fuse box and BCM.
There is a large (10-12ga) purple wire from the dash control circuit going into the connector and a large black wire leaving.
The black wire is bundled with orange electrical tape and runs in the rocker panel along the drivers side back to the rear window grid connector on the drivers side.
The passengers side grid connector is the ground connection.
There are also some other smaller wires in the same connector (under the carpet).
The burned pin in the connector was so bad that I had to build a splice jumper (10ga crimped & soldered) around the bad pins.
The other smaller wires and connector pins where fine so I just left them alone.
Make sure your repair is strong, there is a lot of current in this circuit and hence the reason why the OEM version failed."