Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Alaska Vehicle heater question

Kinda figuring too, can have one cord for "cool" and plug in rest for "cold"...

A battery with undamaged plates/cells and fully charged, won't freeze at -37, let alone +37.

I don't understand your post, John.

You are correct that a fully charged battery will not freeze but if they are partially discharged at all they will. I've seen it first hand on hundreds of batteries. How do you know when a batteries plates haven't been damaged or become contaminated with minerals or other foreign substances? The answer is when your battery will no longer hold a charge, gets hot or consumes electrolyte (sulfuric acid/water) and with todays maintenance free batteries you don't know it's low until it's too late. And never run tap water in your batteries (non-maintenance free), use distilled water, the minerals in tap water will adhere to the plates and over time cause them to lose their ability to generate electricity (and get hot) and that will shorten its life span.

I still have a few quarts of Conoco DN600 in the garage. that was the go to oil on the slope in the 70's.

I feel that an oil pan heater is a must infact I’d take a oil pan heater over a block heater. A trickle charger or a wrap heater for the battery.

Having had a vehicle with only an oil pan heater, I will disagree.

+100

Same here. With modern lubes, it's a non issue. Fully charged battery, and a warm engine, and you're good to go.

Jeff,

Getting back to your original question, yeah any water proof J box will fit your needs BUT you'd better watch your wattage on whatever heaters you do install.

I don't know where you plan to plug all this crap in but a single 20 amp breaker has its limits.

For 20 AMP you have 20A*120V or 2400 watts and 15 AMP you have 15A*120V or 1800 watts. Good Electricians will only plan for 80% load so you have 1920 and 1440 watts respectively at your disposal per circuit.

My experience has been that most block/oil pan/battery blanket type heaters pull between 750 to 1400 watts each.

Extension cords are notorious for voltage drop or loss. When you only have say 100 volts at the working end of a 100 ft extension cord it increases the amp draw, if that makes sense to you. If it don't look it up, you'll find charts online showing how much the amp load increases as the available voltage drops. It's simple math.
A cord can read 120 volts until the load is applied and then it drops like a hammer.

A good 12ga cord or even build yourself a 10ga cord for the job can help limit this voltage loss.

So lets say you install two or three different heaters, plug them all in and it works, the breaker you're using holds....Keep in mind most of those heaters are thermostatically controlled..... So at 3 in the morning when it gets colder than hell and all the heaters you installed are digging in full bore ..... bam, ya blow the breaker for the circuit your extension cords plugged into and ya got nothing when you need it the most.

All that work you did installing up-teen heaters completely backfires on you.

Unless you plan on installing your own power plant in the bed of that truck to run all the heaters off of ya need to take to heart what these guys are sayin' and don't try and go over kill... not even a little bit. Keep your batteries in good shape and you'll be fine on them, never used more than a solar trickle charger for that.

Worse case scenario I've seen for guys insisting on the use of diesel pickups in remote areas with subzero temps with no available power they just built a fire and shoveled hot coals under the engine compartment and waited it out.

I'm good enough with power, I"ll have separate dedicated circuits if need be.

I"m guessing my buddy that lives there that has a few of the heaters, has low amp heaters.

But I'm not totally ignoring all this. Just really the type that would rather put em there and not need to plug it all in, than all of a sudden its bad cold and I need em.

Speaking of that instant load..... reminds me of summer here, which is about equal of your winters, in power loads, and having power go out and us having to refuse the lines once the issue was sorted out. Learned really quickly you better not try to refuse a whole line, you better pull all the doors out, fuse the line, then close doors one at time since everyones every last fridge/freezer and central air was going to be pulling load instantly. Bang. LOL.

Great posts. My kid is moving up to Fairbanks next week and will need to set up his F150. Any recommendations on what the wattage needs to be on the oil pan and transmission heaters? He already has a block heater installed.

I use only OEM block heaters and no other heaters as I've had too many worn and damaged wires shorting out.

Start that engine and let it idle with transmission in NEUTRAL so as to circulate the fluid.

I've also had bad experiences with Auto Start.

A heated garage ain't all bad!

Dual stock block heaters should be all you need and a 0-30 oil

Jeff, you should probably get one of these and just be done with it: Webasto

LMAO!! But they said it won't be in by Christmas.

I sure appreciate you folks humoring me along. Trust me its tough having never seen much less than about -15 or 20 basically and being used to flipping 100 or more possible any month of the year and damn near guaranteed 6 or more months.

Merry Christmas folks!

You need to do all of the heating methods on the 7.3L It wasn't a good cold weather starting engine.
MM879

Gee. I wish someone had told me that before I had one in Fairbanks.

I've always bought what fits the largest flat surface on the pan without making an sharp bends. (Figuring the less stress you place on the pad, the less likely they'd start flapping on an edge.) I don't think they're very much wattage as I recall.

I use another - probably 75W- pad which I wrap around the battery, not attached, and the a couple wraps of alum/mylar bubble wrap black-taped around the battery. (I don't like the idea of a battery sitting on a pad; too much to go wrong IMO.)

Tranny also needs a pad. If you're too cheap to feed it a few watts, just buy another tranny and see what that costs.

NAPA has the pads you need, if the local hardware doesn't.

When my girl kid went to fbx with a car, we put a trickle charger, and oil pan heater on it. IIRC, it would have required lifting the engine to put a frost plug heater in it.

As long as the trunk is fully shut (and the trunk light is off) it starts and runs fine.

Worked fine for me in Alaska for 7 years, North Dakota, Michigan, Wyoming, etc in below zero temperatures.