Thanks fellas...
Since there is no more hot water coming from a gasoline engine, I have selected ceramic elements for my heater. These cheapo space heaters can be found at wal mart or home depot for around $30.
When you open up these heaters, you can see the ceramic heater element that is needed out of the space heater.
Each space heater is 1500 watts, which is enough to warm up a bedroom or bathroom. Since cars are a little more drafty, I use two of them for 3000 watts. More than enough for a Metro. I need to swap out my water heater core for an electric one, so I made this one. It is polyester body filler, and my multimeter does not detect it. After running my heat gun on it and watching it with my infra red temp gun, I was able to determine that this stuff is suitable for use up to 500 degrees F. I also do a lot of bodywork, so there are always cans of body filler around in my shop... Anyway, here is my electric heater core. It slips in and out of my heater box just like the factory heater core did. Two elements side by side, and ready to wire up.
Here is how it looks in my heater box
Since there are two heater elements, I set it up so that you can turn on one at a time. Kinda like high and low. When my heater control knob is in the cold position, The linkage looks like this. Note that I have added two micro switches on the lower left in this picture.
In this pic, the heater control knob is moved halfway, to the point where the blue stripe transitions to a red stripe. Notic that micro switch number 1 is pressed by the linkage, but switch 2 is not pushed yet. This turns on one element for 1500 watts
When you turn the heater control knob all the way to hot, the second micro switch gets pushed which turns on the second element as well for 3000 watts. 3000 watts is excessive, but it is nice to get into a cold car and have 165 degrees F blowing out the vents within seconds. Once the car is warm inside, 1500 watts is very nice for maintaining a nice warm car so I turn it back down. From a drivers perspective, the electric heat mod is seamless, but it has more heat output capability than factory and there is no waiting for a thermostat to open for the heat to start.
