Heater for the car.

DEL 707

DEL 707

DEL 707

Soldato
Joined
20 Mar 2004
Posts
4,577
I like to chill out in the car doing lunch break, but it's starting to get a bit nippy.

I've been looking something that I can plug into the cigarette lighter to warm up the car.
There seem to be quite a few different products around, but are they worth while?
Also, how quickly is something like this going to drain my battery?
 
Whatever you plug in there will drain your battery quickly if the engine isn't on.

Anything with a heating element is a dead short, so will use loads of power.

I park facing south towards the arc of the sun and on sunny winter days it's surprisingly warm in there. On cloudy days I sit indoors.
 
You need about 1-3KW to run an electric heater. No battery will last long and a 12v one won't be powerful enough.

Even on an EV it will eat battery charge pretty quickly in winter as it's using an electric heater, rather than waste heat from an engine.
 
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Get a LFP power station about the size of a suit case and cheap fan heater from screw fix.

Depending on the size of power station you can run the heater at 1000 watt or 2000 watt for around an hour.

These have built-in inverters, just make sure you buy one of the appropriate wattage to match the heater you want to use.
 
I looked into this many times before, but never found anything that works well enough.
Ideally you need to plug the car into some sort of block heater, or remote powered heater to really make it work. Retro-fitting it usually a little awkward with waterproofing/locations/plug types.

It's one of the reasons why so many modern cars have this feature built in now, with them usually being connected to the mains when at home!
 
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Nasher said:
You need about 1-3KW to run an electric heater. No battery will last long and a 12v one won't be powerful enough.

Even on an EV it will eat battery charge pretty quickly in winter as it's using an electric heater, rather than waste heat from an engine.
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Some EVs have heat pump heaters, so a lot more efficient than an electric element.
 
Maybe take a look at a battery powered heated jacket. There are a few cheap ones on Amazon. Or, if you wanted a decent one take a look at motorcycle shops. Some can be run off a battery. Others need a cigarrete lighter but you can get those on larger power banks.
 
Bubo said:
There is waste heat in your exhaust gas, so you can recycle that with an appropriate length of hose I would have thought.
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Not to be one to suggest something without trying myself first, I just had a go at this during my lunch break just now. Sure enough, it got warm quite quickly and was quite pleasant. Then, after a bit I started to feel all cold, so something was not quite right. It was the pounding headache and feeling of imminent death that really put the mockers on though. So a good idea in theory, but the cons probably outweigh the pros in practice.

So, could I suggest you see if you can convince some of your work chums to sit in your car with you instead. Say about 5-6 would fit, plus yourself. Not only would this immediately displace a significant volume of chilled air, the effective body heat output while you are all chilling would be quite significant. Now there will probably be a few who will say "But why don't we just sit in the office?". Ignore these people, they have no sense of adventure.
 
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