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Originally Posted by Stubby79
Until the engine is running, or the oil is otherwise being made to flow, I don't see it heating a lot of the oil.
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Completely correct.
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If the engine is running, the oil will get warmed up rather quickly from the already pre-heated block as soon as it gets flowing.
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This is exactly what I thought, but apparently its not really the case. Oil Pan posted a bit ago that his oil pressure doesn't drop until significantly after the coolant is at operating temperature. Temperature testing would be very interesting to see how oil temp lags behind coolant temp.
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You could flow hot coolant through your oil pan, similar to your idea of installing heater elements in the pan. But if/when they leak, your engine is in trouble.
Can you make the oil flow through a non-running engine somehow? Then the engine block is your heat exchanger.
Spinning the whole engine would waste too much power. Doubt you can spin the oil pump with it still attached to whatever drives it in the engine. So...an external pump with it's own pick-up tube, pumping oil up in to one of the rocker covers? Well...now we're just getting complicated...
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Quite true, if you want to get beyond this point, it starts getting more complex. I do like the idea of flowing coolant through a heat exchanger in the oil pan. This gives us the opportunity to preheat the oil with the block heater, but we'd likely need an electric water pump. IMO this would be a lot easier than trying to flow oil without the engine running, but still not easy or cheap.
Of course, we can also use a pad heater on the oil pan to heat it up as well. But, that only works when you can plug in, and the heat exchanger works everywhere all the time.