De-ice the car properly!

Whatever happened to those little paraffin heaters you lit under your car overnight so it was easier to get started with the starting handle?

But that's not heating you, which is what a car heater does.

We had vans at work with diesel burning cabin heaters. That got the cab warm far quicker than the coolant fed heater.

Sound like it was faulty. But older air cooled VW got their heat from the exhaust.

I have seen similar in North America.

Forty-something years ago I was caught in a snow storm on Skye, in August! It was memorable because the previous day we'd found a body and the cops suspected us of murder (very long story).

Bill

If the time ever comes when I have to drive an electric car the least thing I'll do is carry a 2kW genny and a few cans of fuel in the boot. The other way will be to have a 10kW genny on a trailer.

Bill

Big lorries generally have one. It's necessary for sleeping in the cab or for for the long waits at the docks.

Bill

If I have to go out in the morning I park the vehicle where the dawn sun will shine on the windscreen, and I put an electric fire inside. First thing in the morning I hit the switch in the house that turns the outdoor sockets on. It doesn't take very long for a 1kW blower fire to clear everything.

Bill

Erm no.

As I 'said' before , I remove loose/surface snow with a scraper .

Spray with Iso-propyl.(have gallons of it to clean my (bicycle) brakes(Hydraulic disc).

If needed, I give a quick 'bloop' to the windscreen wipers whilst activating the screen wash.

The rear screen is heated I can usually see out the back anyway but the heater ensures I have a clear view by the time I am out of the cul- de-sac's car park.

That brings me too a side point how do heated windscreens work? I fully realise rear windows have wires in them but I have never seen a windscreen with wires yet I have seen cars specced with heated windscreens.

"Not all portable generators will work for charging a Tesla. There are a few important things to consider.

The generator absolutely must have a clean sine wave output. This means that your generator needs to be an inverter.

The Tesla charging system can tell when the output isn?t a clean, pure sine wave and it won?t let you charge.

This is important because a surge could cause damage.

Tesla built in a helpful safety feature by not allowing a charge unless the power is stable."

They made it harder than it needs to be :-)

One other web page noted the same thing - they tried the portable generator, the BEV stopped accepting charge. They went the extra mile, to making the car smart enough to recognize ghetto powering.

If you think that's bad, you should read up on the procedure to change a battery. The parts have to be "registered" with one another, for that to work. Simply unplugging the old $4000 item and plugging in a new one, won't work. This avoids a secondary market consisting of stolen batteries :-)

It has a good bit of anti-DIY in it.

It's enough to make you build your own car.

Paul

On my Beetle, the heater control was basically a lever which opened flaps allowing hot air in from the engine area. These stuck after a period of disuse, always in the open position.

The air could get really hot. I recall one motorway run where my passenger's shoes distorted in the heat.

Freeing the mechanism was a crawling-under job.

Never any detectable exhaust smell though.

Chris

Fords have fine wires embedded in the glass. You soon forget they are there, and would probably find them hard to see from the outside.

Chris

From cars I've been in with heated windscreens, they appear to have some form of barely visible diamond pattern embedded (presumably between the laminations?) not sure if this would annoy me as a driver?

We used to have that at work. Every parking spot had a duplex outlet. It got removed when the lot needed to be paved at one point.

Surprisingly, not many people used that. I would occasionally use the block heater on my older cars. But with the

In the old days, your aids were:

2) Oil heater. This is the one with a pump for circulating the oil. Never had one. Not interested.

My current car is the first car that's had no block heater fitted. The car still starts at -26C. Although I would probably delay departure until later in the day, to reduce stress on the engine. (They're a bit oil-starved at startup at that temperature.)

Paul

You can use the corner of the scraper, to "score" the ice.

Then work the scraper at 90 degrees to the score line.

But this only works up to a certain thickness of ice. There is always a thickness of ice which is too much for any technique.

And the reason this works, is the scraper is plastic. If your scraper had a metal edge, you can't do that. Even some standalone plastic scrapers, are too strong and brittle for their own good.

What you'll notice about that scraper, is it is relatively small. The five raised things are non-functional in the picture, but they tell you "which side is up". You can score the ice with the corner of that scraper, to get a starting point, so the scraper won't keep slipping off.

Even the branding on that thing isn't important. For years, it had no brand on it. It was just a stick in a bin full of sticks. But that design has been consistent for decades. And it's relatively cheap.

I've been given other sticks, but they sit in my basement.

Paul

Expect in winter when you?re driving toward a low sun. They can be rather annoying then.

Tim

Registering new components has been a feature of many ICE cars for quite some time. It?s not exclusive to EVs.

Tim

Except! Fecking speelchuck...

Tim

I found I was aware of them at all times. My eyes sometimes tried to focus on them rather than the outside.

People used to have special flat paraffin heaters they put under the engine. Or drain out the coolant and replace it with hot water.

(Anti-freeze wasn't universal in those days; it was only used in the winter in any case. I suppose they could have drained it the night before - provided they remembered they had done it!)