So far I have excuses rather than results. I just got my brakes repaired with a new bracket and sliders in order to get ride of the drag issue on my left rear caliper. I have been noting when torque tells me when the engine is at operationg temperature.(70 deg C)curs very close to 4 kms +- 200 meters, and 300 cc's +-30cc's, but i have left the logging to the torque application for now as I wait for a stable weather pattern. We been getting frosty mornings up to only a week or two ago.
Which is about 7.5 L/100km, not bad compared to my current three tank average of 6.1L/100kms.
With those numbers in mind I only have a 1.4L/100 km benefit range over those 4 kms at best or 56 cc's which works out to about 0.5 Kwh of power. 1.25 hours of plug in time. I suspect that engine will only heat up to 20 to 30 degrees so warm up will still be needed.
I will have the opportunity to use this for only 4 cold starts per tank. 90 percent of my trips are long 100 kms each way. The grill blocks are very effective at keeping the engine fairly warm in my afternoon drive home and I see the benefit there too.
I intend to wrap up this experiment this month, with real numbers. Sometimes I just wish I could parse the datat right off my torque logs quickly and easily. I have over 6 months worth of logs of nearly every trip, all in rather large CSV files.
In other news. the grill blocks are doing a fine job. Today on the way home I peaked engine temperature at 111 degrees with the radiator fan at full speed. with an ambient temperature of 24 degrees C, and IAT averaging high 30s to mid 40s with no problem at all.
interesting fact thought.... the temperature guage on my car finally moved signicantly off the center (splits the two horizontal lines on the coolant symbol 95 degrees) and lifted to 3/5 (106 Deg C)mark. According to the guage the car does not panic until north of 4/5.
