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How to get the best performance out of your heating system
If you're going to be driving around with little or no clothing on in your vehicle, you might want to watch what I'm going to talk about today and that's the performance of the heating system in your vehicle.
We get a lot of e-mail at Motoring, and a frequently-asked question concerns the performance of the heating system. So let's look at three components that are critical to good performance of your car's heating system.
The heart and soul of your car's heater system is the heater core itself. Normally, you'll never see the heater core because it's installed inside the passenger compartment of the car on the passenger side right behind the firewall. This much of the heater core from here back is inside the car and these fittings project through the firewall into the engine compartment and are hooked up to heater hoses connected to the engine.
The hot coolant enters the heater core, circulates through the heater core and a fan inside the car, the same fan that does your heating and air conditioning, moves air through the heater core to give up hot air into the car. The coolant exits the heater core through this fitting over here and, if you look at this one closely, you'll see why we replaced it - because it's got a cracked fitting and it was leaking badly.
Many heater cores today are plastic tanks and plastic fittings, just like this one. They'll quite often split or crack and cause major coolant leaks. This core is made of aluminum. They stand up pretty well. But some heater cores will plug up with calcium and then you won't get sufficient coolant flow to properly exchange heat into the interior of the car.
A heater core is typically a hundred dollars or more for the part and several hours to change - some cars can take you all day to replace this component depending on how hard it is to access. One of the first things you want to check, though, if your heater performance is not up to scratch, is the thermostat in the engine.
The thermostat in the engine's cooling system opens to control the coolant flow through the radiator. It tries to regulate or maintain the engine coolant temperature at about 195 degrees Fahrenheit.
A third component that can often cause problems with the heating system is the heater water valve. Not all vehicles contain this component. Depending on how the heating system is configured, you may or may not have a water control valve. Dodge minivans, for example, use them. Most Honda cars use one controlled by a cable. This particular one is actuator-controlled by engine vacuum and the water valve controls or throttles the amount of coolant leaving the engine and entering the heater core. So if this thing is stuck or seized, obviously it's going to severely affect the performance of the heating system.
When you've got problems with heater performance, one of the first things you want to do is check the level of the coolant in the cooling system. The heater core is physically the highest part of the cooling system so, if the coolant level drops, it's one of the first things to lose coolant. If there's not sufficient coolant in the system, it's not going to exchange heat.
So check that coolant level, then go to items like the thermostat, the heater core and the water control valve. Check everything and make sure that you're going to get proper heater performance.
'Til next week, I'm Bill Gardiner for Motoring 2002.
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