De-icing the car or van with an electric fire

[Bill Wright]

It works rather well. I have the fire on the lowest setting (1kW) and leave it on a board on the seat for 20 minutes. It's worth the fourpence.

Bill

[Harry Bloomfield]

Bill Wright formulated the question :

You have the fire brigade on fast dial?

[Andy Burns]

Having had a couple of early/cold morning starts, I was thinking of popping the fan heater from the garage in the car, ready to switch on in the mornings, but not sure whether the door seals would take a cable thick enough for a heater, or I'd end up with a chopped extension and a live car :-)

[Bill Wright]

My risk assessment was that there was no significant risk. Why do you think otherwise?

Bill

[Bill Wright]

Just leave the door slightly open, that's what I do. I always make sure the cable goes in the driver's door so I can't just roar off and drag it down the street.

I have also used a 120W greenhouse heater for this and left it on overnight.

Bill

[Andy Burns]

Maybe a few alternating L/N/E cores from this :-P

[newshound]

I used to have a CX estate which filled with water, so there was sometimes as much ice on the inside of the screen as the outside. I used to have a little industrial fan heater (700 W iirc) and used to leave it in the load area for up to half an hour. Still had to mop the inside of the windows, but apart from that very effective indeed. I had a friend with an ID19, and his wife used to drive ten miles into the Bristol city centre in the mornings. One day she started off on a foggy morning with very little visibility all the way to work. When she got out of the car, she found all the fog was on the inside of the windows.

[Clive Arthur]

Electric? A real man uses a real fire.

Cheers

[Brian Gaff]

Is this a fan heater? they normally work but you need a good quality extension cable as it seems that most have stupidly short mains cables these days. I used to do this with an old greenhouse many years ago. Brian

[GB]

Why not open the window slightly and pop the lead through that?

[Andy Burns]

Because I wanted to place the heater in the car the night before, then turn it on from the comfort of the house in the morning, rather than have the car fill with snow overnight ...

[Huge]

Why not fit an engine pre-heater?

[Tim Watts]

Rolled up plastic bag stuffed into the 1/2" gap works wuite well - I did that when running a dehumidifier after the boot got wet.

[Andy Burns]

If the manufacturer allowed the option of an auxiliary heater on UK models (they do/did offer a diesel burning heater for European models) I might well have chosen it.

[Huge]

Plenty of aftermarket ones ...

[Andrew]

Indeed. What you need is one of those paraffin sump heaters that Halfords showed in their 1965 catalogue.

Or a VW 411 combi-estate with the auxiliary *petrol* powered heater.

[fred]

Those sump heaters were utterly useless. We had one.

It used to be possible to buy a heating element that could be inserted in t he pipework from the radiator and heated the water. These things predate as lternators, more relaible engines and better batteries.

[fred]

Om further thought gat a cab heater as used in lorries which run off diesel

[Huge]

There's no "used" about it. Still widely available.

[AnthonyL]

Just what I was about to say before I saw your post.

The other random memory were the little braziers we'd make from Tate & Lyle syrup tins and some small bits of coal.