How do you get your car to warm up quickly?
 

I'm running an almost total grill block, but I can still make the 5 mile drive to the library without having the car get warmed up...Today I took my mom's car while mine was torn up and from the library it warmed up in about a mile of driving!

Needless to say, I wonder why my engine is so slow to heat up and how I can fix it. Should I just run a complete grill block? Are they any other tricks besides that and the block heater? Does anyone else have a similarly slow-to-warm car?

Thankz!

Quick answer: full block + block heater for sure.

I have wondered: would a more efficient a car be slower to warm up? Makes sense to me.

The fastest warming car I've ever driven was a Mitsubishi 2.0L (I think - whatever the motor was in the Talon/Eclipse/Laser).

Do you have a belly pan on the front end? That would help. I guess the T-stat is working as advertised?

An efficient car with low rolling resistance and low drag is going to take longer to warm up since the engine is having to do much less work to keep it moving. I recently drove my dad's 02 Honda Civic sedan and compared to my car it felt like you were always driving through mud or shallow water and its engine warmed up much faster than mine does (and got much worse mileage).

Check your thermostat. It may be sticking. Or, change thermostate to lower temparture type.

I'll prolly change my t-stat at some point anyway. In some sense it's a moot point right now because I'll only be driving 2 times in the next 3 months, but I was just wondering, :)

I'd like to know too...
 

With the latest barrage of cold Weather, it became an overly simple observation that we all know. It takes energy to make energy. In this case, fuel into heat.

I'm still testing and experimenting with this idea. Clearly, the EBH is the way to get it done quickly. But what about without a plug?

Would it be beneficial to perform WOT acceleration (with an RPM limit) to dump some fuel at a rapid rate? Since it's probably in open-loop anyway, boosting heat production while in this already-inefficient state could generate enough heat to get to closed loop sooner and into the most efficient mode of operation.

The question as always, would this practice use-up too much fuel as opposed to a slower warm up? Also, those with automatics are at the mercy of their gear selectors -- in my case I can force 2nd gear start, try WOT up to 3K and get a blast of heat. Closed loops follows, and we're into standard hypermiling configuration.

Consumption over a course needs testing. Problem: varying temps and wind speeds from day to day are a problem here -- you need a fully cold-soak start to test, which could mean 2 consecutive mornings or a morning and night-time test. Has anyone tried something similar?

RH77

How about blocking the exhaust? Somewhere or another around here someone did an experiment that showed the engine heated up faster with the tailpipe restricted.

On the subject of exhaust.... Seems like heat recuperation could be beneficial... I could see it acting like a separate EGR system (or even add a wye valve to the existing EGR) and pipe hot exhaust into an exhaust-->coolant heat exchanger....

Clearly not as beneficial as a block heater, but no plug is necessary :)

Just a thought :)

Hmm...
 

An excellent thought, I might add. For testing purposes, how could we go about implementing this?

The first thought is a potato...:p ...or was in a banana in "Beverly Hills Cop"? Runs in my mind that poor Ford Fairmont didn't "fair" so well.

Perhaps a metallic funnel or similar shoved in the tailpipe -- that way the narrow end diameter can be trimmed for proper flow and driveability.

RH77