Toyota Trucks: Engine Heater Recommendations?

Okay, then. It's -35°F this morning at my house in central Minnesota.

It's an adventure trying to get vehicles started. The '90 V-6 Toyota
pickup has a regular frost-plug heater installed, but at these
temperatures it takes a long time to thaw a whole engine with one of
those.

Without boring all with extraneous details, I'm in a special situation
where I can't plug the vehicle in overnight to 120 VAC. And no heated
garage yet, obviously. What I need is a high-wattage engine heater to do
it fairly quickly.

My old diesel tractor has a 1500-watt-ish one of those "tank heaters"
that heat coolant and circulate it, installed in one of the cooling
hoses, and it works wonderfully. A couple of hours plugged in, and it
fires up like summer -- gets the engine near operating temperature.

Does anybody have experience installing one of those or something
similar in their truck? One possible problem is that I guess those
heaters work by convection, and so would need to be mounted low. Looks
like both of my heater hoses pass through near the top of the firewall.

I worked in northern Canada in the early '60s. All the vehicles in the
motor pool had block heaters.

Later on, back in the states, I had a Dodge 1/2-ton PU and I installed a
heater in the bottom radiator hose and it kept the block warm by convection.

Seems to me that keeping the block warm (if that's all you can do) would be
preferable to keeping the crankcase warm.

They do make dipstick heaters though but I don't know how effective they
are.

Bearman


"David Buchner" <net> wrote in message
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