Well its officially reached -20°c here in the interior of British Columbia and my new to me 91 pickup with a 3."opposite of fast" has no type of coolant heater, block or otherwise making cold starts well... Cold.
So I have been given a 1500w tank style coolant heater which seems quite toasty.
Iv looked in to how to install these with the inlet plumbed to the drain valve on the rad or the drain on the block and the outlet tee'd into the heater core inlet.
This is all good in theory but research has shown me that finding a fitting to thread into either or these drains are close to impossible.
So in order to remedy this I'm thinking I'm going to tee the bottom rad hose for the inlet and plumb the outlet to a tee in the heater core inlet, that should Work...
I would go with a lower rad hose inline type but I don't think that will work because the turdmostat is closed and I don't think 150-200w is going to be hot enough to open the turd-stat to circulate the coolant and that's the hottest I think they get... I'm open to rants and suggestions

PS my gramps tells me its to hot and will rot my heater core or melt the solder of the heater core? ... Which doesn't make sense because the coolant is hotter with the truck running than with the coolant heater running?

 

Is a real block heater not an option? They're like 30 bucks, which is less than you'd spend trying to plumb that tank style in.

 

Very true but with a free coolant heater and 20$ in plumbing parts I get a super toasty heater and since in routing it through the heater core may result in a thawed windshield..... That and I don't really want to dig for the burnt out frost plug heater that's conveniently located behind the driver side motor mount but I might have to suck it up and do that anyway.

 

Now this is going back quite a few years so I could be wrong here.

The tank heaters I had and used way back when.

Heated but did not circulate the coolant does yours have some sort of pump ??

The ones I used were made to just go into a lower radiator hose and seemed to work quite well 30 years ago.

I do remember also seeing them that went into the heater hose it did not seem to matter just where they were plumbed in but if the output of the heater was enough to heat the size of the block

Then there were different kinds some you could plug in an hour before you wanted to turn the engine over.

Then the others you needed to plug in while the block was still warm or it was unable to be much help

There was no needing to worry about the thermostat which only allows the water pump to circulate coolant in a loop .

The coolant being heated reaches a temperature limited by all the normal things outside temperature size of the block size of the heater etc.

 

Well I hate to report this but in the extreme negative temperature we had last night resulted in a cracked block .. This is a sad day for me, slushy coolant coming from the bottom t cover. I'm pulling it in to the shop will report damages as I find them

 

Well that's a bummer. What was the protection level of the coolant?

 

Well my motomaster coolant tester and it read
-32°c but I guess that's thing is garbage.
I tested the meter with concentrate and it reads -40 friggin p.o.s.

Update
So I got her rolled unto my shop which was pre heated to about +25°c and she has sat there for bout 4 hours... So far everything is melted off and there is no free flow drips or anything and everything seems to be drying up...
No loss of coolant so far... Gotta do a pressure test

Update

Put it up with the hoist at work. The leak seems to be coming from the bottom of the water pump by the turd mostat and then dribbling down the block.
It only does this during warm up and cool down...