winter warmup tip
 

brought this up last year, but it was near the end of the winter so thought i'd bring it back again:p

simple time to warm your car up a tad faster and save some fuel - turn your heat fully off until the car gets warm.

why? simple, the heater core is like a small rad and all you're doing is putting coolant through it. hot coolant heats the car. keeping it off means that theres less rad for cooling during warmup thus warming your car faster and saving you some gas.

besides, when its cold it doesnt do much good!

I believe some of the fancier cars (e.g. '85 Lincoln Continental and '84 Lincoln Town Car) do this automatically. The heater doesn't turn on until the car is warmed up enough to get warm air out of the heater.

The best heater I ever saw was the gasoline heater in my 1960 Corvair. It would produce hot air within 30 seconds of starting the car, and had no effect on engine warm up.

A block heater, plugged 2 hours before using the car is the best thing to install, its simply warm up the prestone, that warm up the oil engine (I THINK). I use it with synthetic oil (less thick) and I love starting my engine at -15 Degree F, feels like its 0 outside. Maybe more usefull for people living north.

And yes I mostly don't use the heater on the car, but for defrost its critical when you start sometimes, ice formed inside the car.

Winter, got to deal with it, anyway I love it, cold is great when you know how to do with it.

I don't think they're available in the US, but in Europe you can get a kit with a block heater and an interior heater (both, obviously, powered by the mains power). I think I learned about that in another thread here, but I'm not sure.

Hey JoeBob I think your corvair was an air cooled motor so yeah it make heat really quick off the exhaust manifolds just like the old Beetles . . . and that warm air also came with carbon monoxide a lot too.

i got a block heater too, love the thing. its a canister heater thats plumbed into my rad hose and the line for the heater core.

The later ones ('61 and later) DID use the cooling air for cabin heating. And there was a recall about 1970 or so to replace the seals around the edge of the sheet metal shrouding to reduce the exhaust drawn into the car. The 1960 models used a separate gasoline-fired heater (dropped mileage by about 1/2 mile per gallon) that gave really nice heat while the engine was still cold. That heater supposedly also gave a lot of carbon monoxide. In fact, it was the subject of a Congressional hearing.

Heated AC
 

Like most cars today, when you turn on the defroster it ativates the AC to dry the air out, course the AC is going to condensate and make its own water. What I have noticed is the long time in winter it takes to build heat to overcome the cold. So lets say I have to dig the car out of the snow, I'll start the car, put it on heat and not defrost and let the car heat up inside while shoveling off the car, thats good, because when you drive you have enough temp to overcome the AC coil.

Now next morning, no snow, car is clean, its cold, so you warm up the car, but the heater isnt warm enough to overcome the defroster and your freezing inside the car waiting for full temp to come up.

I wish manufactures let the driver decide if they want the AC to dry out the air. Like when it was minus 4 outside, after a 5 minute warm up, the 8 minutes of driving was a freezing experience.

I feel the same way. It's one of the things I like about my VW...probably the only thing on the car, besides the manual transmission, where they allow the driver to choose and control.

I always think I'm going to hack my truck to act the same, it should be easy, but I never bother spending a few minutes doing it.

As far as installing a switch, you can find them at some auto parts stores for fog lights, its a beefy silver push pull 20 amp switch. I used to use one on my Fiat to override the thermostatic switch on hot days for the electric fan.

Now talking about heater boxes, having had 2 bugs, 1 bus, and a Karman Ghia, most of my heater boxes were replaced with headers. Having owned all the VW's in Southern California, winter only required you to dress warmly. When the heater boxes worked, it was kind of a cross between a hot oven and a cigar parlor room.

The boxes would normaly shed leaking oil, but if oil trickled down the header tube and into the box, then you began to think you had taken up smoking without ever lighting up. One of the most clever inventions I ever saw was a small oil cooler radiator with a fan to provide heat getting rid of the exhaust heated air and the smell.

The 2 companies that made the under hood fuel fired heaters were Ebescher and Stewart Warner. They both claimed a fuel consumption of 1 quart an hour. The last fuel heated car was on the VW thing, it used an Ebescher. Both were neat contraptions, they had a fuel pump, spark plug, and a tiny coil for ignition. Having heard them run at VW shows, it sounds like a little oil fired furnace.

A couple of my friends in high school had Corvairs, great, stout cars. An aluminum engine with about 300 pounds, tons of torque, and the front suspension that was a double A arm affair. I wish they still made them.