Truck Details
1996 Ram 2500, aka "Flat Stanley"
Seat Build Details
- 2018 Ram 2500 Laramie Seats
- Black Leather Wrap
- Perforated Heather Suedezkin Body
- Reticulated Foam backing material
- Matching contrast stitching
- Airbag Delete (Going in older truck)
- Memory Computer Bypass
- Matching Center Seat w/ Storage
- Powered Driver & Passenger Seat w/ Lumbar
- Thermoelectric Heating & Cooling Upgrade
Thermoelectric Heating & Cooling Upgrade
The 4th Generation Ram Seats use fans that pull air through the leather in an attempt to keep you cool by removing body heat. This makes sense on paper but in practice its led to Ram being at the back of the pack for cooled seat performance. Since these seats were being installed in an older vehicle we were presented with two options. We could either reverse engineer the heating & ventilation system or we could retrofit a proper heating and cooling system onto the seats. We chose the latter.
This swap was fairly in depth and required a number of custom made pieces, we wouldn't recommend it to anyone who isn't experienced specifically with installing Thermoelectric heating & cooling kits onto seats. The seats leanback required both an intake for the fan, and an exhaust port for the waste air. Custom hardware was used to mount the units on the Ram frame. We would not recommend this project as a DIY for your average Joe, but for those of you crazy enough to wonder "Is it possible?", the answer is YES!
The Result
RAM may have made a mistake in using a suction type system, but it actually paid off dividends in the end. The tight ventilation channels usually tasked pulling air through now make a perfect passageway for airflow, allowing a large volume of conditioned air to pass through with minimal resistance. This can be seen visually in the flow test.