Keeping Warm in Winter

[ANDY4004]

I have 2 battery packs which are inverters. They have a AC 3 Pin Socket(UK), and also a cigarette lighter socket. I have bought 2 (12 volt fan heaters) which plug into each battery pack, via the cigarette lighter socket. I have mounted one on the Dashboard via a magnetic Mount, and one in the back of the car, which I use when the back seats are folded down. The Battery packs sit in the back footwells. I wasn't expecting them to be brilliant, however they kept the car fairly warm for over 2 hours yesterday. The only drawback is the battery packs do take quite a long time to charge.

 

[Don]

It would be interesting to hear the specifications on your battery packs and heaters. How many amp hours are the 12 volt batteries in your packs rated for and how much current do the 12 volt heaters draw?

I'm guessing your heaters are 150 watts or less as most cigarette lighter sockets are fused at 15 amps or less. I bought a 12 volt 'heater/fan' from Harbor Freight last week for $10 (on sale) which I hope to use to keep the windshield defrosted (defogged actually as it never gets 'frosted' down here) and it is rated at about 120 watts

http://www.harborfreight.com/12-volt-auto-heater-defroster-with-light-60525.html

Read the customer reviews if you need a chuckle - "You are better off trying to defrost your windshield with a match. This thing puts out almost no heat whatsoever" is typical of most reviews, so don't expect too much :lol:

If it's COLD outside, I can't imagine two of these 'heaters' doing much to warm the inside of the car - The car's onboard heater is rated at 5,000 watts and a pair of 120 watt heaters would seem to hardly be a drop in the bucket!

If your battery pack(s) runs low, you can plug one of those heaters into the car's accessory socket. Our socket is rated for 15 amps and it will power the heater with no noticeable drop in range - The heaters .12Kwh is another drop in the bucket running off the car's 16Kwh battery pack, so it will use less than 1% of your car's available battery power . . . . hard to detect a 1% change in your RR

Don

 

[peterdambier]

I have been thinking about an oven driven by tea lights, little candles in an aluminum cup. Those little things can produce some 40 watts, enough to keep a cup of coffee warm. Five of them can make as much heat as Karin and me do together, some 160 watts.

A copper bottle some 5 liters? used to warm a bed at night can do wonders. Either fill in some one and a half liters of boiling water or even better fill it with some 5 liters from the tap. I guess our tap is some 50 or 60 Celsius (130 Farenheit). I dont know the math but it can deice the windscreen and keep us warm some time.

We have successfully implemented the tea lights in deicing our refrigerator with some 7 tea lights. We have successfully implemented the copper bottle when jumping into a frozen ICE car, surviving the time until the enging started to make heat of its own.

Neither of them were much help in our i-MiEV when charging in cold summer nights.

Before insulating doors, front and back lids, a 1kW / 2kW fan and heater was a big help deicing an i-Miev and preheating. It feels like working as good as our 5kW heater in the i-MiEV. No wonder, it does not need boiling water fore heating the.

Freezing time again. After insulating our builtin heater has proven to do wonders in defogging the car and keeping us worm on the way home, a trip some 80 kilometers and more than half of them with mild heating at a temperature around freezing.

We still use the fan for getting rid of the ice and preheating. Last night 2kW took some 20 minutes to get 15 Celsius from 0 outside. It took three and a half our to drop down to about 1 Celsius when it was minus 2 outside.

Most of the time 1kW is enough but when "il fait frette, pas froid" that is when your backside might freeze to the toilet seat, 2kW is more appropriate.

Cheers
Peter and Karin