The blower motor went out. The problem started in the spring of 2012. There was no air movement with the a/c turned on, even on the HI setting. I could hear a whine coming from the dash area that would turn on and off as I turned the a/c on and off.

I found tips on PriusChat .com that if you hit the dash area, the a/c will come back on. That didn't work for me, but I found a "sweet" spot on the lower left side of the glove compartment. Multiple complaints on PriusChat had me convinced it was the blower motor. I had to repeated hit the sweet spot for several months whenever the a/c wouldn't work. Eventually the problem became permanent and hitting the spot did nothing.

The Toyota Service dept at my local dealership quoted $800 to do the repair. I bought the part from them for about $90 and my dad did it for a hug. After replacing this part, the a/c worked perfectly. The car is now at 156,000 miles (12-30-2015) and the part is starting to fail again. I have had to hit the sweet spot about 4 or 5 times in the last 2 months. I will post a separate complaint for when it fails completely (again) so I have exact mileage to report.

My wife came home saying neither the heater nor the defroster would work on her Prius. Took a look for the normal culprit...blown fuse. No luck. Thanks to the internet and the extremely common issue of the blower motor being a piece of cheap crap, specifically in the 2008 model, there were plenty of how to's online that helped me out.

After calling around for prices on a new blower motor I found that prices for a simple blower motor ran from $85 (Autozone) to $105(O'Reilly's). Seemed pretty steep to me, but it was still a lot cheaper than the bill from a dealer or service shop would be.

I figured I would check this out for myself before making a trip to the auto parts store.

So, after some time wedging my 6'2" 220lb frame into the passenger floorboard upside down to access the area of concern I dropped the glove box and removed the protective panel. To get to the bottom of the blower motor box, I had to remove the transmission controller which was a simple two screw job and very easy to get to. Unfortunately, the bottom of the blower motor box was not as easy. The six screws around the perimeter of the box that attach the lower section to the upper section are not impossible to get to, but doing so with two hands and at my size was going to require a lot of twisting, cussing and holding my breath. What fun!

After I removed the lower section, the three screws that hold the blower motor into the box were easily accessible. Odd Tidbit: While the tools used to this point were all metric, the screws holding the blower motor into the box on my polished turd were SAE. Nothing like having to unwedge myself, go get my regular socket set and reinsert myself into the floorboard.

After dropping the blower motor I checked connections and found no loose wires and, upon starting the car, the blower motor magically worked. Son of a... back to the prius forums I went. Turns out the blower motor is a really simply and really crappy design. Apparently the carbon brushes tend to stick in the housing after a few years use.

Honestly, I couldn't say that I saw this issue in my motor, but I do know that some air compressor action really loosened up a cloud of fine black dust. So I cleaned up the motor without disassembling it entirely and reinstalled all the parts. The blower seems to be working fine now.

This all took just about an hour for me to get done. It would be closer to 30 minutes a second time around since I now know what I am looking for and how it all fits together.