Friday, November 9, 2012

First Snow... and an Idea for Heat

Christmas is in the air, and I've already broken out my Christmas music. Just in time too, today we had our first real snow storm, and well its a lot of snow. As I was driving back from school this morning the sleet was just turning to snow. It was beautiful, I thoroughly am enjoying the snow.

On my way home I noticed a slight problem with defrost. Bundled up I usually do OK in my car in the winter, but  there is one thing that I miss about a really good heater, that's the defrost. The heater in my car does pretty well on the bottom half of my car, but he struggles to get any heat to the front windshield. I was able to drive OK when I broke out the squeegee to keep the window clear, but defrost would be nice. I was bumming the internet when I found a solution. 

12 Volt Heater
This is a 12v heater from Sports Imports that has duct work coming off of it. If  it were hooked up to the stock Auxiliary heater switch it would blend in perfectly on the dash, but then it could be hooked up to the vents on the dash and have defrost and heat from the dash vents. I've never been a fan of gas heaters in cars, but I wanted added heat in the winter. I think this is a great solution for anyone in need of something a bit more. It could easily fit in the trunk as it is only 9" x 5" x 4" and then easily connected to the vents in the dash, and at a price of $239.89 its a good comparison to the gas heaters, because you would have to locate and restore a stock VW heater. Not to mention the gas heater never hooked up to the dash vents, it only had one vent underneath the dash, which really was a big hole that heat came out of on the driver side.

Another future addition to my beetle to put on my dream list, sure would make driving in the winter easier. What do you guys think, would you bother with it? Or have you done something else to improve the heating in your VW?

2 comments:

  1. It might work pretty well but you should know that putting an auxiliary heater in a Beetle in any but the very coldest climates, like the NWT or Antarctica, is a bandage for the real problem. An unmodified stock Beetle heater in good shape is plenty adequate for Utah Winters. Find out what's wrong with the stock heater first.

    http://www.ludwigandgertie.com/2011/12/myths-rants-part-first-in-which-one-of.html

    Alright,
    whc03grady.

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  2. I think I found the part of the problem this morning. When I started it up I checked the oil, and noticed that the passenger pre-heater hose was all torn up, it had come off and was dragging on the ground, I checked the driver side and it had a hole in it too. Hmm, this could be part of the problem. My heater channels are pretty solid From what I can see, that's one reason I bought this one I'll have to examine it more closely just to make sure. Is the defrost usually sufficient? I have the corner ones hooked up, and the middle defrost. The middle one never seems to do anything, and the passenger side never really worked well either, but this mornings discoveries solved the passenger side problem.

    I'll have to look over the heating system more carefully, sounds like it should be pretty toasty.

    Thanks whc03grady

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