How important is it to first warm up the car? winter

Who's in the driver's seat of the police car while the officer is writing up a $50 ticket?

-- Floyd L. Davidson Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska) snipped-for-privacy@barrow.com

You live where it doesn't often get cold either...

Do that every day for 3 or 4 months and your car won't last long. Just cold starting once in awhile might only be the difference between an engine that runs for 200,000 miles instead of 250,000 miles. If you only drive 20k miles a year and trade it in every 3-4 years on a new one, *you* don't have any engine problems, but the sucker that buys it does.

Just because it doesn't fall apart the third time you do it doesn't mean you aren't causing excessive wear.

-- Floyd L. Davidson Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska) snipped-for-privacy@barrow.com

How many miles of road are there in Barrow? Bob

That's what I do with my truck, when I need to scrape the windows. Otherwise, I open the door, start the truck before getting in the seat, get settled into the truck, then take off. Planning on putting Mobil 1 in the crankcase when I'm due for my first change on this truck.

...started up quite nicely in mid of october and will be shut down in march?

Ha ha... Just kidding... :)

But there are some places on Earth where that is only way to keep your car on duty if you don't have a heated garage. In that lands -36C is not a cold snap, it's a thaw. That's true. Believe me.

Theres a lot of articals in google if you search for "cold start" "engine wear" Use the quotations so it searches for those groupings of words.

Heres one that happens to be from a canadian

qualifications are at the bottom of the site. Opinions are as we all know.... However I see no reason what so ever to slap a car into drive right after its started in the cold or even in the summer. I personaly like to allow fluids to flow a little and allow some thermal expansion to take place before I put a load on anything. I dont like being pushed out of bed and made to run in the cold so why would I do the same to my car? Would you run a race before stretching? Some are saying that it would goto into close loop faster if you ran it. Yeah so it would, however as I see it I would rather replace a cat conv before an engine any day. High performing race engines are allowed to idle before their ran. Especially if they have aluminum connecting rods. Metal gets on the brittle side when its cold so let it build a little heat before you stress it. If you dont like to wait then do like some suggested and keep the rpms down. Thats good, I do that as well. Putting the car in neutral so the trans fluids flow while it idles is a good idea as well. Either way most of us are set in our ways so lets leave it at that.

I spent 20 years living in Salcha, some 40 miles southeast of Fairbanks, and working in Fairbanks. I put 200k+ miles on three different cars.

Which is a wee bit of experience, given I've seen -70F once, and have seen weeks go by when it never got warmer than -40F. (Which isn't bad, as other places in the interior get down to -80F.)

All of that is the reason I live in Barrow today. It's significantly less extreme as far as cold weather goes, and I typically drive about 2 miles a day rather than 80-100. We've got maybe 40-50 miles of road, but I make an effort not to use them!

Around here if you don't plug in your vehicle, you won't get

20,000 miles on it!

-- Floyd L. Davidson Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska) snipped-for-privacy@barrow.com

I'm curious, who lives in places where air temperature gets down to

-36C

That's COLD!

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Such as at the station in Antacrtica? The planes they send down there never get shut down when there, they leave them running, otherwise the oil will gel, from operating temp, in a matter of minutes. Local ANG is one that does missions down there, and was involved in the rescue of the doc. that had cancer. I actually think it was a plane from our base that picked her up...

Depends on what you all are calling cold and if its plugged in or not. 0F no problem for most vehicles if you have winter oil, -20F and colder it gets hard on things and should be plugged in it.

I live in a cold climate and worked as an automotive tech.

1# problem I always seen with engine wear was people who never changed thier oil. Never mind starting the car with out plugging it in!

Above the snowbelt in Ontario, we get to see that occasionally. Good thing I have a heated garage that keeps the car around -2 to -5 depending on how severe it is outside.

I used to have an 84 Buick LeSabre, and after that, an 89 Cadillac Brougham. I found that on some days, the only way to keep the car going was to sit behind the wheel and keep my foot on the pedal, giving it short bursts of gas to keep the engine from stalling. When it kicked down to low idle (choke opened), I'd need to leave it running for another 5 minutes so that it didn't stall under initial load.

I remember having to replace the Buick's carb after some garage goon stripped the thread of the fuel filter housing, spilling fuel all over the manifold. It really changed the car's character... after that, it needed three pumps before starting on days below -10.

Carbs were tempermental as hell during cold days, but gave the car a lot more character.

The law doesn't apply to American cops. I see them turn on their bombs to get through a red light all the time.

You wanna see a stressed pilot, just get on one of the milk run flights across the North Slope on a day when it's -40. Most of these are Beech 99's or Cessna Navajo twin engine turboprops. They *have* to shut the engines off to allow passengers and freight to be move on and off the planes. The anxiety level for the pilots is a geometric progression if things don't progress fast enough! (I've never seen a plane get too cold to start though, so anxiety seems to do the job!)

Of course, those are propeller driven planes. Here in Barrow the

737's that Alaska Air flys in don't shut down the engines while on the ground.

-- Floyd L. Davidson Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska) snipped-for-privacy@barrow.com

Now I'm curious. I was stationed in upstate New York and the temps reached -30=B0F in the winter. We did not keep our jet engines running all the time and it's difficult to get a B-52 or a C-135 into one of those itty-bitty hangers. The oil used in jet engines flows just fine at low temps; it's the fuel that is the problem. Most jets (at least the ones I worked on) use a dry sump system. I'm not sure what the bottom temp is for jet engine oil but at room temp, it looks and flows like water.

I was a C-130 flight engineer in the Coast Guard, and the only thing in the flight manual about operation in extremely cold weather was to let the engines run in ground idle for some brief interval after starting (5 minutes or less, as I recall) before putting a load on them, when the ambient temperature is below some level. It was a really extreme temperature threshold;

-40F comes to mind.

There was definitely nothing in there about not shutting the engines down at all if the temperature is below a certain value. Maybe there are special, supplementary procedures employed by the NY ANG for use during the Antarctic winter. I never heard about any special cold-weather precautions being taken with our planes that are based in Kodiak, Alaska.

I have JPEGs of several of several LC-130s parked wingtip to wingtip in Antarctica. There are special heating units that blow air onto the prop domes through the holes in the spinner tips, and into the intakes, to warm the engines prior to starting. That would appear to be what they do when the planes have remained overnight, which I'd think they do more often than not because their staging area (Christchurch) is such a long flight away.

If it's Plattsburg AFB, New York, it would have to have been. The New York ANG took over the Antarctic support mission from the Navy several years ago.

Floyd Davids> (I've never seen a plane get too cold to start though, so

It's not the engines so much as the batteries. Extremely cold temperatures can reduce the cranking power of batteries.

Barrow isn't very big. I'd think that because of the small number of people getting on and off, the planes don't stop long enough to justify the hassle of shutting down and starting up again.

Geoff

Chokes increase the richness of the air/fuel mixture, but they do it by restricting -- "choking" -- the volume of air coming into the engine, not by increasing the amount of fuel.

Since gasoline is volatile, that gas comes right out of the oil as soon as it warms up. And since the engine is running with no load on it *before* it warms up, I'm not sure I see how any additional wear, let alone damage, would be inflicted on the engine.

I saw a training film years ago about how to cold-proof an airplane in preparation for letting it sit in extremely low temperatures overnight. The airplane used as an ex- ample was an old P-2 Neptune, which is relevant because it had piston engines. Using controls in the cockpit, it was actually possible to pump small amounts of gasoline into the engine crankcases to keep the oil from thickening. No harm was done, since the gas evaporated when the engines warmed up the next time they were started.

What's the purpose of revving the engine a few times? (I take it that this is what you mean by "accelerate.")

Geoff

What brought that on? Is it being presented as a safety issue, an environmental issue, or a theft-prevention measure?

Geoff

Geoff Miller wrote in alt.autos.gm

Probably theft prevention. The Seattle Tacoma area is one of the leading areas in the country for auto theft, and one of the more common ways to lose a car is to start it up on a cold morning, and sit inside drinking a cup of coffee. And many of the people go out and find their car missing.