It Was an Amazing Thing

I got in my truck this morning and had instant heat coming out of the heater!

I've owned my truck for at least five years I think... I'm not sure. It's a decent truck--Very comfortable and nice to drive, and most everything works. On the inside of the glove compartment is a list of all the ordered options that the truck came with from the factory back in 1986.

One of those items was a block heater.

For those of you that don't know, a block heater is exactly that--A way to heat the engine block. It doesn't have anything to do with the radiator--Only the engine block itself. It's actually a small coil device that is installed into one of the freeze plugs on the side of the engine block, down low and underneath were you can't see it. It has a standard 3-prong 115v plug on the end of it, and it's neatly coiled up and tied down under the hood of my truck.

As long as I've owned the truck I've never thought about plugging it in before, because until I divorced and moved it spent it's whole life parked inside of a garage, safely out of the weather. See, when you get to park in a garage, you're so happy about the fact that you're getting into a nice, dry vehicle and don't have to scrape ice off the windows and stuff that you don't really think anywhere past that fact. The fact is, when you get into a vehicle that's parked in a nice, dry garage and drive off, you still have to go a ways before you start to get heat out of your heater and defroster. After all, the engine has to warm up first.

Yesterday I went out to go to work in the snow and ice and my truck wouldn't start. It was probably a choke issue... I either flooded it by pumping the gas too much, or the choke flapper never closed completely and it never got the right fuel mixture to start in such cold weather. In any event, the engine refused to start and the starter started turning slower. At that point I just got out of it and went over to the Neon and started it up and scraped its two days worth of snow and ice off the windows before heading to work.

That's when it hit me. I should give the block heater in the truck a try. When I got home from work, I stretched my heavy-duty extension cord out from the garage and plugged it into the truck. Because my extension cord is an outdoor cord, it has this strange feature that makes the translucent receptacle end glow orange when it has power to it. For that reason, I tucked it up into the engine compartment so some passerby wouldn't think my cord was having a meltdown ring my doorbell. I plugged it in, carefully noting whether or not any strange things happened (smoke for instance). After noting that everything seemed okay and no breakers blew, I went inside and forgot about it. This morning, I was anxious to try it out. When it was time to leave, I first went out to the garage and unplugged the cord, then did my usual exit out the front door. After popping the hood and unplugging the cord, I tucked it in under my Neon to keep it out of the way (the other end went under the garage door into the garage). I got in my truck and hit the starter. Wow... I had never heard it turn over that fast! It started up immediately and ran smoothly right off the bat. I reached down and turned the heater and fan on and, well, you know the rest.

I almost laughed all the way to work this morning!