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Old 11-16-2017, 08:51 PM   #29 (permalink)
Daox
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Quote:
Originally Posted by redpoint5 View Post
During this cold season, I have been turning off the car heater until I see normal operating temperatures from my coolant gauge (approx 4min). My theory is that this slightly reduces the time needed to warm the engine and enter closed-loop mode. Is there any benefit to my practice? If so, any guess as to how much of a benefit could be found?

The idea sprang from what I had learned about an over-heating car I used to drive in high school. Whenever the car would begin to over-heat, I would blast the heat on full to control engine coolant temps. Not fun when it's 100 degrees outside!
I dug this thread up while putting together the fast warm up compilation thread. But, I wanted to test your idea. So, I did.

I normally turn the heat on in the Civic when the coolant temp gets up to about 140F. So, I set the heat dial on the Civic to cold, and let it warm up to ~140F. Once I turned the dial to cold, I would see a drop in coolant temperature as the heater bypass valve opened up and dumped cold coolant from the heater core into the engine coolant circuit. This cold volume of coolant was enough to drop the coolant temperature down 5-8F degrees. I was quite surprised that it cooled it down that much.
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