Run Oil Pan Heater off Inverter Away From Home?

[glennc]

It would be interesting to fool with.

Just for some simple math, if the heater takes 120 watts then that would be ten amps. If the loss due to the inverter is 30% (just a guess), then you are drawing 13 amps.

If you have a 80amp-hour battery then I'd think you could run it a couple of hours and not worry about the drain too much. But some batteries are much smaller, maybe 40 - 50 amp-hours.

- Glenn

 

[eljefino]

You'd want to over-rate the battery since it performs worse when you need it most the colder it gets.

How did they use to do it "back in the day"? Fire might be involved, from either a gasoline heater of some sort or charcoal briquettes under the pan?

Would you consider a chemical solution like those "hot hands" packs you shake?

Don't burn your truck down, of course. I'm just trying to think outside the box.

 

[M3 Mitch]

I don't know if you can get them in the States, or if they still make them, but Webasto of Germany has made fuel-burning block heaters in the past. That heats the water, not the oil but should be more practical I would think.

Running a resistance heater from a battery I guess can be done, but particularly with an inverter in the system this seems like the hard way to do it. The battery could be plugged directly to the oil pan heater and it would work at about 1/10th normal since a heating element does not know or care about AC vs DC.

 

[George7941]

A 120v heater running on 12v only generates one-hundredth of its rated heat. A 250w element would only generate 2.5w of heat. Heat output varies as the square of the ratio of voltages. Example. 240w element draws 2a at 120v. 60 ohms resistance. At 12v would draw 0.2a, 12 times 0.2 equals 2.4w

 

[Ugly3]

Would probably work if you ran the pan heater just a few hours a night. You will need more than a trickle charger to get the battery recharged overnight, I would guess a 6 amp minimum charger, maybe a 10 amp would be needed.

 

[TallPaul]

I have a 250 watt Wolverine oil pan heating pad and it works great, but at work the truck sits nine hours without being plugged in. I am thinking that I can run the heater with a 400 watt power inverter. Since I don’t want to risk draining the truck starting battery, I would have to get a small, say 250 amp hour, marine battery and mount somewhere. Then to charge the marine battery, I only have a 16 mile drive, so probably a trickle charger over night. Could plug it in with the pan heater so there is only one plug to connect coming and going.

What do you all think? Would I need a voltage regulator on the trickle charger? Not sure I am going to do it. Just toying with the idea. I could borrow a marine battery from the motorhome for the winter.