My dad used to tell tales of building a fire under big caterpillar tractors up north, if they ever stopped.

Once we did the coals (from our wood furnace) carried out in a bucket, and dumped on a cookie sheet then slid under the engine when we had a vehicle stopped a mile from the house.

All of our vehicles had block heaters. The vws had a circular thing under the centre of the crankcase. They also had a "battery blanket" to keep the battery warm. Vanagons have no space for those, but they were essential back in the day.

(Also from Winnipeg)

...r

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On Sat, Jan 2, 2016 at 2:22 PM -0800, "Jeff Palmer" <jpalmer@MYMTS.NET<mailto:jpalmer@MYMTS.NET>> wrote:

But how do you point a spot light up when you're parked in a snowbank :) easy to slide the box underneath the oil pan.
Oil pan heaters work better than you'd imagine given the "fin" issue.

Jeff in balmy Winnipeg (-2c!)

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> On Jan 2, 2016, at 12:35 PM, David Beierl <dbeierl@attglobal.net> wrote:
>
> At 11:51 AM 1/2/2016, Jeff Palmer wrote:
>> I've made a little box with aluminum foil and a 100w bulb. You'd be surprised how much heat that produces.
>> Jeff
>
> Around 350 BTU/hr if all the visible light gets turned into heat.  Your basic 1500 watt electric heater makes about 5200 BTU/hr.  A heat lamp bulb doesn't waste much as visible, and has a built-in reflector.  I think they might be 150 watt.  And I've used a halogen work light to remove microprocessor sockets with a couple hundred pins from a circuit board.
>
> Yrs,
> d