Project Daily Driver: Heat

My 4×4 truck has no heat. No worries. Heat’s not rocket science and I was far more concerned with complex stuff like locking differentials and shit. Also, I’m open to unusual solutions…

C’mon… isn’t that photo bad ass?

Anyway, I mentioned that my truck isn’t yet rebuilt enough for winter fun. “…it doesn’t have heat. I don’t mean the canvas top and the ungasketed windows are drafty, I mean it’s utterly 100% unheated. The components that once did that are long gone. There is no insulation anywhere and no heat at all. In winter it’s like riding in a vibrating refrigerated steel box.”

I got several comments about how to plumb into the vehicle’s coolant lines and work up a heater. I get it but that’s not my plan. Since my truck has no heat and all of the parts that I’d need are gone I have a blank slate. The truck’s cab is tabula rasa baby! My plan is to install a diesel furnace.

Now hear me out…

You see that? It’s a VEVOR 8KW Diesel Heater, Diesel Heater All in One with Remote Control and LCD Screen.

IT’S GLORIOUS!

I bought it for myself as a Christmas present. It’s not installed yet but I did some preliminary tinkering. I know the thing works. I was pleased with its performance. It even has a remote and has things like a thermostat.

I really like this idea. There’s thinking outside the box and there’s drop kicking that damn box into the cheap seats. A diesel heater is NOTHING LIKE a regular car’s heater. In my mind, it’s better.

There are pros and cons. Pro:

• A diesel heater cranks out heat like a boss. My truck’s heater (even when new) sucked. Rebuilding or replacing it with basically the same thing isn’t going to give me the blast furnace, camp on a frozen lake in the middle of January because you roll that way, heat. I fired up the heater for a test run in my garage and it rocks!
• A diesel heater doesn’t get its BTUs from “waste heat” in the vehicle’s engine coolant system. Ever waited while a stone cold car took forever to generate heat to defrost the windshield? During testing I got full throttle heat out of the 8KW Vevor in less than a minute. My old truck might take 20 minutes to warm up like that.
• A diesel heater, being unrelated to the truck’s engine can make heat even if the engine is shut down. The sole limit is that it needs enough 12v juice to fire and run a small fan. Beyond that, it’ll run all day and all night without needing a truck at all.
• This is the the big pro: being unrelated to the truck, the heater could be removed from the truck and used elsewhere. Imagine some glorious future where I setup my super awesome winter tent and route furnace heat into it! Just let that idea roll around in your head for a while. Savor it. Be one with it. Grok the implications! That’s a big deal. Possibly the biggest of the big. If portable reliable externally vented heat doesn’t sound like a big deal to you, then you’ve never truly been cold.
• Being unrelated to the truck, the odds of losing heat AND engine simultaneously is vastly reduced. If I’m out in the freezing outback and smash a rock so hard I shove my truck’s driveline spline through the bell housing… well at least I’ve got heat. If the heater craps out… well at least I can drive home. This “redundancy” might same my ass someday.
• It’s relatively cheap. I left this for last because it’s hard to believe it. The heater, which is an “all in one” system set me back about 150 clams. It would be hard to create or rebuild a heating system that doesn’t cost a similar amount. That said, it’s not all about money. I’m more concerned with max heat with redundancy than the absolute cheapest solution.

Cons:

• It’s fueled by a small fuel tank. It’s 1.3 gallons and you can even use “farm diesel” but you’ll have to top it off. Forget and you’ve got no heat. I’m sure I’ll spill it all over the place every time I fill it up.
• It’s not “waste heat” so the fuel ain’t free. That said, I don’t care. Suppose you got stuck in a snowdrift and turned your engine off (to avoid carbon monoxide death) but ran your fancy furnace (which has a properly vented exhaust pipe) on high for 8 hours straight. If you had to pay $4 for a full night’s very strong and reliable heat, would you care? What about if it was heating your tent or ice shack all night? The little beast is pretty efficient. It burns supposedly between .04 and .16 gallons per hour. The literature says the tank capacity can run 8 hours at the maximum listed consumption setting. Because no sane human knows what these fractions of a gallon mean, I interpret it as between 1/3 and 1 1/3 pints per hour. For the American based alcoholics out there, it’ll burn less than two cans of shitty beer in volume for an hour on “blast furnace” mode. You’ll most certainly not run it that hard. I was messing around and the thermostat cycles on and off just like a house furnace. Also that dumb little lunchbox took a fair shot at heating my entire garage just during testing. Also, I’m not suggesting you drink diesel instead of shitty beer.
• The heater wants 12v, my truck is 24v. Bummer! This too can be handled but it ain’t plug and play.
• This is the big con: I need to route exhaust and power systems and output hoses and stuff like that. It’s not like you can just toss it in the back seat and turn it on.

Stay tuned for part 2.