Four reasons your ride isn’t warming quick enough
On several levels, your vehicle’s heater is actually pretty simple.
Your engine generates a lot of heat. Coolant is pumped through the engine to help cool it down.
In the process, that coolant gets hot. Heat from that coolant is captured and pumped into your cabin to keep you and yours from freezing.
Congratulations: now, you know where the miracle of mid-February heat inside of your vehicle comes from.
It’s often in the dead cold of a Canadian winter when drivers start complaining about poor performance from the heaters in their rides.
Sure, some cars don’t heat up like they used to. One friend owns an old Chevrolet Tahoe with an iron-block V8 engine.
This engine stays warm for hours and hours after you turn it off in the cold. In a new car with an aluminum engine, that’s not the case.
Today, virtually all engines are made of aluminum, and they cool very quickly when parked for even a few minutes.
Do some groceries and likely you’re re-warming the engine from scratch when you set off home with a trunk full of ingredients.
Today, smaller and smaller engines are heating bigger and bigger vehicles, making it trickier to keep
things warm.
Automakers are starting to use supplemental electric heaters more often to help keep things toasty.
But what if your trusty ride just seems to be deteriorating in the heat department? Could there be something wrong?
Yes, actually, and it might be your very own fault.
Here’s a look at a few common causes of poor or slow-to-arrive heat and what you can do to ensure the warmest possible commutes for the remainder of the season.
You Don’t Know about your Cabin Air Filter
The other day, my dad complained about poor heat from his VW Jetta. I asked him when he last changed his cabin air filter.
He asked me what a cabin air filter was.
After a quick Google search for instructions, we went out to his car and removed the cabin air filter, which hadn’t been changed in at least four years and about 90,000 kilometres (You’re typically supposed to change a cabin air filter about once a year).
Dad’s crappy heat was the result of his filthy cabin air filter. Try as it might, his heater blower fan would only be able to move a tiny bit of air into the cabin through this plugged filter. With a new filter installed in just a few minutes, dad was cruising in warm comfort again.
Your air intake is blocked Usually, air being drawn into your vehicle’s climate control system enters through a vent concealed
at the lower edge of the windshield. In the fall, this area can be blocked with leaves and sticks and seed pods. Then, in winter, ice and snow and rain can freeze things over, blocking airflow. Find out where this vent is located and be sure to keep it clear.
You’re Cranking the Heat Too Early
When your heater is turned on, it actually helps to cool your engine, too, since your heater works like a smaller version of your radiator. When it’s very cold, most drivers start their engine and crank the heat right away, but this makes it harder for your engine to heat up since it’s trying to get warm while you’re trying to cool it down. So, try an experiment: all rides are different, but turn the heat on very low, or leave it off, for the first few moments of driving, instead of blasting it. In many cases, your engine’s initial heat-up will happen faster if you turn the heat down, or off, for the first few moments of driving.
You’ve Ignored Cooling System Maintenance
Ignoring maintenance requirements is a bad idea and ignoring the maintenance needs of your cooling system can leave you with a poorly-performing heater.
Your owner’s manual likely requests that you have a coolant system flush performed every so often. This ensures there’s fresh coolant flowing through your engine and helps keep contaminants and sludge and debris from building up in that coolant. If you fail to properly maintain your cooling system, this sludge and debris can accumulate in your ride’s heater core, which is a vital part of your heater system. When guck blocks the flow of hot engine coolant through your heater core, the amount of heat that can be used to warm the vehicle cabin is slashed.
Solution? Stay on top of cooling system maintenance and, if you haven’t, talk to your mechanic about a heater core flush.