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Yea FORscan has been pretty neat. My 2001 truck doesn't run the glow plugs, the ground signal from the PCM doesn't work, I see a lot of mentions of a diode that can burn out. No clue if the fuel heater is functioning or not, but the element appears good.
Finding a quality 100ft extension cord is quite a challenge, my dad bought one years and years ago and recently at harbor freight I found about the same thing but probably made in China, but 12 gauge, 100ft cords are hard to find. My house has quality wire (rewired myself) with a new breaker panel, so the house side of the wiring should be good =). I haven't thought out the best route for hooking up the block heater, thinking heavy extension cord and plug/unplug from within the house, maybe try a timer but their limit is 15 amp and my dad mentioned it's 1500w.
It seems kind of silly to not run the alternator, but I guess the load is more than what the alternator puts out so maybe it would damage it. Sounds like that truck just about requires a block heater for winter, that's a pretty massive drain on "starting" batteries. Long long ago my dad built a truck and he used a heavy equipment battery for the starting battery and it worked really well for him, tons and tons of capacity (nearly 3x the physical size of a normal battery) and it wasn't much more than a standard starting battery. I make harnesses and battery cables for my small business, so toying around with idea's like that shouldn't be too hard to build a custom set of battery cables for.
It seems to me, the factory battery setup is just barely enough to get a truck going in the middle of winter and to recharge the batteries from such a drain would take a while. The engines start pretty quick once warm so should take a ton less power for starting/stopping after the initial start I'd think.
Crazy thing on cold starts, my dad's backhoe with a Perkins in it has no glow plugs and even with a low battery it fires right up in the cold. I'd guess it's higher compression since there's no turbo on it. Google says it should be around 23.5:1, so yea a fair bit higher compression. I'd think an engine starting off with a higher compression ratio would be ideal for the intake valve being delayed open style idea. Too bad it couldn't be enabled/disabled on the fly. Cold starts leave it high compression, once warm drop it to the lower compression ratio (but still full power stroke) and have a turbo on it that can spool up to offset the lower compression and such for power/efficient burn.
I noticed the 2001 truck doesn't have a vacuum pump either, looks like everything that was vacuum on the older trucks is electronic on that truck. The "brake booster" setup looks interesting, looks like an electric motor, but not sure how that works.
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