Today I followed by own advice and pulled out the under-hood fuse #26: IT WORKS! Now no more stupid A/C when my wife is trying to warm up the windshield with the defroster setting. You see, the Mazda 3 is my wife's car. I borrowed it during a light freezing rain and after about 10 minutes of driving the ice was really accumulating at the bottom of the windshield.

I thought to myself "THIS IS STUPID, I'M GOING BLIND HERE!" Another 10 minutes and soon the ice would be all over the windshield and I would have to pull over and scrape the stuff off with an ice scraper. Turning on the heat full blast on the defroster setting didn't seem to give enough heat to melt the ice because the stupid A/C was cooling off the air blast coming out of the defroster so that it had no heating effect on the glass.

I pulled into a local Zehrs (Food store), looked at the fuse arrangement in the owner's manual, identified fuse #26 as the A/C fuse, popped open the hood, opened up the under-hood fuse box and was surprised that fuse #26 was all by iself. The fuses above and below #26 were not even there (as shown in the user's manual). I removed the fuse puller from the inside of the fuse box cover and pulled out fuse #26. I put the puller back into the cover, put the cover back on the fuse box, and put the 10-Amp fuse into that small box in the dashboard just under and slightly to the left of the steering wheel.

I started the engine and took off again. I didn't bother scraping off the ice. Within 5 minutes the ice disappeared and the car is now 100% safer to drive in freezing rain weather! I feel good that my wife is so much safer now when she drives during freezing rain weather in the winter (which happens a lot in Canada).

When spring comes, I'll put that #26 , 10-amp fuse back in so that my wife has her A/C back.