And temperature sensitive. It merely idles round until actually needed. So wastes little if any power - assuming the water pump is still belt driven.
In the days of a directly driven fan, an electric thermostatically controlled one would obviously save power.
I was once a passenger in a car with a serpentine, multi-v belt. The driver accelerated hard and suddenly the oil pressure light came on and the car lost power.
We could see nothing wrong, but restarting gave nothing more than idling and the oil light was still on.
It took ages to find the fault - the belt had shed a section of its outer surface, which had hit and damaged an under-bonnet relay. That relay was operated from the oil pressure switch and had two functions - one was to work the oil light (hence why it was staying on) and the other was to switch the fuel pump to full speed to give enough pressure for normal running (hence idle only).
The remains of the relay cover were removed and a piece of the broken cover jammed in the relay to hold the contacts closed to get us home.
SteveW
Ah, I forgot. My father's Citroen had a clutch mechanism driven off the belt. When the clutch seized, the belt snapped and a piece about 1/2" long managed to fire through the tiny slot between the upper and lower timing-belt covers - with disastrous consequences.
SteveW
snipped-for-privacy@news.>> >>> Cars haven? had fan belts for years. Fans are all electric these >> >>> days.
No range.
Viscous fans disappeared from most cars in the '90s.
Engine driven fans are not really needed at all when at speed as natural airflow is good enough, but electric ones are far, far better when the engine is idling in a queue on a hot day.
I actually removed the viscous fan from one of my cars and replaced it with an electric one. Keeping the temperature under control under all conditions was no longer a problem. A decent electric fan can flow an enormous quantity of air - far more than a mechanical one can at low engine speeds.
Yes, because they use smaller fans that cool the a/c radiator, without having to cool the engine coolant radiator when it does not need it.
SteveW
The alternators are far bigger than anything needed for an electric fan
- on my previous car, it could drive a 1kW electric heater to speed up heating of the car, as the highly efficient diesel was too slow to warm up in the winter!
SteveW
I'd have thought it unlikely.
In an industrial setting with a horizontally mounted fan and "radiator", I have seen a hydraulically driven fan. With a pump on the crankshaft and a motor under the fan. That would have made more sense than a belt for such a setup in a car.
SteveW
And an extremely expensive battery with a limited life.
But then the extra cost of an electric car would pay for an awful lot of fan belts.
You'd have to define most cars. Still in use in the last decade, if not now. Unless you mean the simple viscous coupling that only restricted the maximum speed. They were old hat in the 70s.
Why not an aux diesel burning heater? Far better than a puny 1kW.
BTW, 1kW is only just over 1 BHP. Some fans take more than that.
That would have traded out at about £2 with a new cambelt and dealers guarantee.
That's a jolly good point.
Transverse engines put pay to fan belts. However there were a few FWDs with inline engines. 2CV springs to mind. Some others here.
I don't remember ever having a viscous because I never had one. Maybe my Opel Manta had one, but that was all. I went from things like midgets and spitfires and the like to the Manta and then to a Vauxhall Astra and jaguars. They were all electric. Maybe the XJS was viscous too.
It like mechanical fuel injection. Yes a couple of cars had it but the transition from carbs to fully electronic was very fast.
Possibly because my transition from broke, running and fixing 15 year old cars, to having enough money to not bother about lifting the bonnet on a car less than 10 years old!!! was quite sudden.
No resale value .
That's very strange, My freelander - now gone - had an oil burning heater that used to come on in very cold weather to get the engine up to temp. It took around 5 miles even with that, but the XF Diesel I have now seems to have something much smarter going on - the engine is warm in less that 2 miles judging by the heater. (It doesn't have a temperature gauge at all). Electronic thermostat so the water cycles round the block only when cold?
No, it appears it does have a thermostat! Must have a smaller water jacket and a high flow pump then!
This bit about diesels being so efficient that they are slow to heat up a car has got to be nonsense.
Think about it. ICEs turn fuel into heat and heat into motion. An efficient engine turns more of that fuel into motion by generating more heat from the same volume of fuel.
Therefore a 100 bhp petrol engine or a 100 bhp diesel are both producing a
100bhp?s worth of heat, it?s just that the diesel is burning less fuel to produce that heat.As a consequence, power for power, efficiency *isn?t* the reason that some diesels are slow to warm up. Much more likely it?s just down to the weight of cast iron in the engine.
Tim
Tim+ snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote
We'll see...
Something that is clear beyond you...
Yes.
But ends up with less wasted heat that can be used to heat the vehicle than a less efficient petrol engine, stupid.
But the diesel is getting more of it into moving the vehicle and with less left over heating the engine, stupid.
Have fun explaining why diesel engines take longer to heat up.
Fraid not.
MPG has gone from, depends hugely on car & year, but typically 20s & 30s all the way upto 90mpg, depending what you get. So efficiency covers the range there of around 4:1. That means a lot less exhaust heat - but the heat going into the engine block is much the same in each case. Improving efficiency doesn't change that, and that's what powers interior heating on all modern ICE cars.
More effective cost cutting means a smaller interior heater matrix, which won't give enough heat output until the engine is hotter than otherwise. Contrast that with the original Lada that was specced to provide a +20C cabin at -40C outdoor temp - an important survival feature in Siberia. For UK use it was overkill, but it did mean it heated up fast.
NT
Dealer charge for a cam belt/water pump job on a Ford Fiesta is around £800! Anyone care to buy a low mileage 10 year old Zetec?
No petrol/diesel either. Free electricity from solar panels Fine for 99.9% of my journeys
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