De-ice the car properly!

I've often wondered about that. Surely the answer would be a much smaller cooling system? Less volume would heat up quicker? But capacities seem similar to petrol cars. Or could be a diesel efficiency gets much poorer at full throttle?

...powered by...?

With electric cars, it cannot possibly be a rare event for the battery charge to be low while away from home.

How often has your screen frozen up during the day? Besides, I said ?too low?.

Tim

No problem. A phone app sets it up for me but I do have home charging but would not necessarily plugged in to use pre conditioning

No. Running all that increases the revs which helps warm uo

Yes. Some diesels have much larger alternators and an electric heater to warm them faster - some Focus diesels had that ... a 1kW electric heater! Unfortunately, mine didn't, and it would often take 4 or 5 miles to really get warmed up. My current car is petrol and is much better in that respect.

Unobtanium, pixie dust and unicorn farts, just like all other 'green' solutions.

It was so bad on my freelander that it was fitted with a small diesel boiler under the nearside front wing.

I dunno how the XF does it. but its less than 2 mile before it is starting to get warm. My guess is a smaller and/or alloy block...

No one seems to know whether

- the engine has excellent coolant management

- the engine has an electric water heater

- the car is fitted with a diesel burning auxiliary heater

ditto

Surely a direct diesel burning heater makes more sense? You could set that going before you get to the car in the morning?

A diesel heater is standard fitment for Fords of a certain trim level if they are destined for a cold country. The UK does not qualify.

No problem with any of that .

Remove surface snow, quick spray of Iso propyl alcohol(so much cheaper than demister) .

Quick clean of the windscreen with the windsbreen washers (hopefully not frozen [but in the winter I use stuff that's good to minus 20 so no problems there]) if it's below that will seriously consider just going back into the house and having a 'duvet day'.

No snapped/torn wipers no stuck/snapped scrapers.

Never had a problem with rubber around windscreen and never had streaking (maybe a tiny bit VERY occasionally but that is cleared by a quick once with the wipers and the windscreen washer).

I would NEVER NEVER never pour even tepid water onto a screen, I know it is strong enough to cope with 200+ mile an hour winds, but thermal shock can do some 'interesting' things.

As I drive a Motability car and they would pay if my windscreen cracked I have no deep seated qualms about breaking it but I still wouldn't want to be of the road until the screen was fixed.

crazy

Like others, I've only used water for defrosting for at least 30 years, no issues with cracking.

Have you seen how little space there is under the bonnet of a Focus diesel? I looked at adding a diesel fired pre-heater and decided it was pretty well impossible. I also looked at electric heaters, as my car is normally parked on the drive at night, but even that would have been difficult, as there was no space for the heater and pump where the pipes were actually accessible.

I am sure that I could have done it if I'd really wanted to, but I could put up with slow heating. Aircon kept the screen demisted well enough and I rarely feel the cold - often de-icing the car with a scraper while wearing a short-sleeved shirt and no jacket or coat.

Well, I would use them but they aren't vegan, have been unfairly appropriated by the Norman aristocracy (who all only have degrees in the humanities), and they only count as renewable if you feed the unicorns soya grown in the USA or the EUSSR under LED lighting driven by tidal power stored in compressed air energy storage systems.

#Paul

Only if it's a diesel and at 4AM

It's not one jolly large cooling system. It's separated loops and a wax plug. Accessory heat is not available immediately, because the car design gives priority to warming up the oil. Once the engine is sufficiently warm, the accessory loop opens and heat is available in the cabin. The wax plug measures the temperature and the wax melts when the coolant is warm enough.

And various posh cars, have other subsystems tied into the main cooling loop. Maybe the oil in the transmission is being heated or regulated by using the cooling system.

Some cars even have electrically heated catalytic converters, which is a feature used to achieve very low lifecycle emissions at the exhaust. Most regular cars just wait for the engine to warm up, and the emissions gradually come down as a result. But some cars waste energy heating the cat for the first minute or two, to drive down the emissions right after start.

If you notice that heat is not available in the cabin for longer than used to be normal, it's possible you need a "rad flush" or "cooling flush". After I had a cooling leak, and they had to do a flush anyway, it seemed to make quite a difference to heating time. I got heat in about half the time. But the effect of a flush doesn't last forever. The car may become a laggard again after three years or so. You would not expect a flush to be scrubbing things clean.

And another topic on frosty mornings, is frost buildup inside the car. I've run into several people in grocery store parking lots, who were clueless. The inside of the car is coated in frost. And you can see them using a credit card to scrape a hole in the frost to see out the window. When that happens, the flappers in the back of the car, that allow one-way removal of cabin air, are blocked. And need to be checked that they're free. If the cabin air movement is working as designed, the vent fan in the front of the vehicle, pressurizes the cabin enough that the flappers (gravity operated) open in the back and allow the air to escape. With good venting through the car, moisture doesn't accumulate nearly as badly. I had to take the trim off in the trunk once, to check the state of those. They seem to use the one-way valve concept for the airflow, so exhaust gas can't get into the cabin from the back. As otherwise, it would make more sense for the back of the cabin to just have a couple "holes" for the job.

Paul