Webasto parking heater

More than 20 years ago, on a particularly cold winter night, I was driving my car homewards, coming from a visit to friends. I had scraped the ice from the windshield, but it was so cold, and the heating of the car directly after starting the motor wasn't doing much, that my windshield iced over while I was driving. I couldn't see where I was going, and the car drifted sideways without me noticing. I ended up hitting the boardwalk with both tires of the left side simultaneously, and both tires burst. So I stood there, with two flat tires, only one spare, at night, in winter. Not a very pleasant situation. Well, I walked back to my friends and phoned from there to get my car hauled to a mechanic, and all ended well. But since then I'm a bit paranoid when it comes to the visibility through my windshield.

So when a few years ago I first heard about parking heaters, I was interested. Heating up your car *before* you start driving is a good idea. But parking heaters aren't cheap, and as I was still driving an old car, installing one wasn't worth it. But this year I got a new car, and in autumn I had a Webasto parking heater installed. Today was the first time where my car had frozen over during the night, and with the use of the parking heater I ended up with ice-free windshields and a comfortable warm car. Instead of scraping ice I just needed to wipe the molten ice from my windshield.

The parking heater I have is burning petrol, it is not an electric block heater that needs to be plugged in. I have a remote control, and 20 minutes before I leave the house I press the on button. The parking heater burns a small amount of petrol in a controlled way, which heats the motor cooling circuit, and when that is warm the fans in the interior of the car are activated to blow warm air against the windshield. Of course that costs me some petrol, but not very much, about 10 ml per minute. A burner is a lot more efficient than letting your motor run while the car is standing to produce heat. And because the burner heats the motor, I use less petrol when I'm starting up the engine. Cold engines waste a lot of petrol.

Bigger cars have parking heaters as optional original equipment. For my Toyota Corolla I needed to have it installed after buying the car. At first I had problems getting it to work, because I use to have the ventilation of the car set to "automatic", which turned out to interfere with the parking heater's control of the ventilation. But the Toyota also has a button to direct the ventilation to maximum windshield defrosting, and that button turns off the automatic ventilation. So since I push that defrosting button in the evening, the parking heater works like a charm in the morning.

Yeah, I know, this is just a gadget. Not something which is absolutely necessary. But I've always been a sucker for gadgets, and this one at least does what it promises to do. I can afford this bit of luxury: a warm car and no more ice-scraping.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:15 PM Permanent Link