Block Heater How does it work?

I’m in MO too - typically it doesn’t get that cold here. My 12.7 is a horrible cold starter. Bunch of elves in the block with hammers.

Mine sits inside. If you use it - make sure you’ve got good connections and a decent amp rated extension cord.

Mine goes through the sleeper, and I almost had a fire one morning due to the older style RV connection that ICT used. I changed it out. I hard wired it to the shop fuse board with heavy guage wire on it’s own circuit.

On the road it runs off the generator. 7.5 kw. You’ll hear it draw down on the gen set when you flip the switch. With a blasting wind through the grille on a cold night it barely keeps up.

Time to get prepared for winter. Great time for a load test on batteries, or replace - check anti-gel supplies, jumper cables and wooly britches

 

how it works, is like this in your coolant-
Kind of a long drawn out video, but essentially youre using electricity with the coolant as the conduit causing heat. That in turn will keep the metal block warm and the oil thinner so your engine wont have as hard a time starting.


One of my 12.7’s is fine down to about 15° (tho i plug in either if I am gonna use it the next day) and the other one is a down south girl and she wants the heat under 35° or she’ll put up quite a fuss kicking over in the morning.

i have used a generator in the past to keep the block heater running if i wasnt in range of an electrical outlet and expected that it would be cold.

In my experience, you’ll use a lot less electric to keep a engine hot than to get a cold one warm in the same time frame.

 

I use mine when it's getting below freezing and it's been sitting for over 24 hours. I normally see the oil temperature rise in 1 degree increments when the truck is warming up, but if I had the block heater plugged in it will go up by like 3 or 4 degree increments initially. It still starts at like 75-90 oil PSI, but gets closer to 60 a lot faster.

 

That’s some ingenuity there.

 

I failed to start the truck twice the last winter when the Temps dropped below 20. I was also thinking about installing it and buying one of those smaller generators available at Costco. The idea of it is that today's diesel prices are prohibitive for 48 hour idling and I'd rather bring a small enough generator in the trunk of my car and simply start it a few hours before the trip, so that the oil temp via warmed up coolant warms up to 32 degrees. That's when it always starts.

 

Most trucks that I have seen with 20 amp receptacle have coolant, fuel and oil heaters or maybe a combination of at least 2 but never just block coolant heater alone. This is the reason for the additional amperage receptacle versus the 15 amp. Do not try to hook up 15 amp standard cord to this. It will melt and overheat the connection causing a potential fire hazard.

 

There the same thing as a 1500w home water heater element, wired to an extension cord. Some might even be the same size as a so called stubby version. Most home electric heaters have 2 1200w elements, 1500w are available for extra hot water. They’re very cheap. If by chance a stubby would fit on the oil cooler of a Diesel, I’d rather just buy a Truck element. Nice insulated water tight wire connections. Probably 2 or 3 times the price of a hot water tank element.