coolant / sump / block heater

Aidan_M_M wrote: »

to do what Paddy? heat the coolant , or heat the boiler?

To heat the coolant, we make a lot of short trips to local lakes, woodlands I'm getting conscious of all those cold miles. The jtd is so efficient its only starting to warm up by the time I get to the local harbour then its stone cold again when you're ready to go home. My brothers suggestion was to stop driving like a granny but i like getting 33mpg too much for that :-p Our passat has a triple glow plug coolant heater and I have a spare one from an old block.

Looking at those plugs they are 12A each so 500W total so probably won't make that much difference given the 6l of oil, 9l of coolant, 180kg engine and enormous radiator and heater matrix that need to be heated.

Actually I just worked out that ignoring heat loss just to raise the temperature of the coolant, oil and engine 1 celcius with the coolant glow plugs would take about 4.5 mins overall a 5% faster heat up - pretty pointless.