Engine Heater Recommendations?

Okay, then. It's -35°F this morning at my house in central Minnesota.

It's an adventure trying to get vehicles started. The '90 V-6 Toyota pickup has a regular frost-plug heater installed, but at these temperatures it takes a long time to thaw a whole engine with one of those.

Without boring all with extraneous details, I'm in a special situation where I can't plug the vehicle in overnight to 120 VAC. And no heated garage yet, obviously. What I need is a high-wattage engine heater to do it fairly quickly.

My old diesel tractor has a 1500-watt-ish one of those "tank heaters" that heat coolant and circulate it, installed in one of the cooling hoses, and it works wonderfully. A couple of hours plugged in, and it fires up like summer -- gets the engine near operating temperature.

Does anybody have experience installing one of those or something similar in their truck? One possible problem is that I guess those heaters work by convection, and so would need to be mounted low. Looks like both of my heater hoses pass through near the top of the firewall.

Reply to
David Buchner
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Bought a pan heater from these folks

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my V8 Tundra. Looks/sounds ideal. But, there's not one flat spot w/oribs on my tundra pan to mount it, so I could not use it. I'd be willing tosell it reasonably, otherwise it goes to my Dad's new '04 F150.

Reply to
dg

Thanks, but I replaced cap and rotor and wires for the first time in its life, and have the plugs in-work, and it's been starting okay with the installed heater.

I wonder: does having a pan of warm oil in the very bottom heat up the motor any faster? Just which parts cause hard starting anyway? I've had plenty of opportunities to wonder about this, the last week or so. Is the actual oil film on the metal parts gooey and offering more resistance? Is it the intake manifold and the fuel itself being so extra cold, that it doesn't vaporize like it oughta, and it's just harder to fire? In that case, wouldn't an electric manifold pre-heater be an excellent high-latitude modification?

I don't really know much about this stuff; I'm just guessing from my haphazard knowledge.

Reply to
David Buchner

I worked in northern Canada in the early '60s. All the vehicles in the motor pool had block heaters.

Later on, back in the states, I had a Dodge 1/2-ton PU and I installed a heater in the bottom radiator hose and it kept the block warm by convection.

Seems to me that keeping the block warm (if that's all you can do) would be preferable to keeping the crankcase warm.

They do make dipstick heaters though but I don't know how effective they are.

Bearman

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> for my V8 Tundra. Looks/sounds ideal. But, there's not one flat spot w/o> > ribs on my tundra pan to mount it, so I could not use it. I'd be willingto

Reply to
bearman

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