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Originally Posted by riksmg1
I would just like to add that in the colder areas a blockheater will help when its between 40 and 50 I have the block heater on a timer to run for 1hour. within 2 blocks im up to 3 bars on the temp gauge and auto stop feature starts working sooner than before. Above 50 there is not much benefit. In my 20 mile each way commute. I showed about a 2mpg increase on that tank since installing block heater. Now that warmer weather is here I will have to wait till fall to check further with the increase in mpg. I metered what the block heater used in electricity my killawatt meter recorded 2.4kwhrs for 5days use.Thats just under .20c at .08c a kilawatt. This is the cheap version of a plugin hybrid  |
Actually, this is another potential benefit of a plug-in hybrid, the car itself could have the built-in block heater, with timers, and warm the engine as well as charge the batteries. Any extra regenerative braking power that could not be charged into the battery could be dumped into the engine-heater wires to act as a big resistor, if warm-up is needed, as well. This would save the brakes more, and heat the engine faster in cold weather. That would be quite important actually as the plug-ins woudl need to start and stop the engine much more frequently due to having more aggressive electric "assist", they'd also have more of a tendency to "cool off" in that time, and running at idle when all the power, save for hard accelerations and high-speed steady-state cruising, is coming from the electric motor would be a waste.