UpState-EV

Almost all people who convert a car to electricity will at some point wonder what options they have when it comes to providing heat for themselves and their passengers. This is not always a matter of comfort. Often it comes down to safety because moisture that is trapped inside of a vehicle at night condenses on the windows and causes them to fog up.

Most will agree that their are three options.

1. An electric heater element that replaces the stock heater coil in the dash
2. An electric fluid heater that circulates warm/hot water through the original heater coil.
3. A heavy coat and magical “Anti-Fog”

In this post I plan to document my heater installation. For my vehicle I chose to go with option #2, a fluid heater. I chose a commercially available heater made by Zero Start. The engine block heaters can be purchased from many sources such as J.C Whitney but I purchased mine on Ebay. Because of this I received an earlier model of the engine block heater in the 1500watt version.

This version has plenty of room inside the cover to add an additional thermostats that one may require. Out of the box it includes on 120deg Celsius thermostat to provide over temp protection. I plan to rewire this to control the 12V relay that in turn controls the relay controlling pack voltage to power the heating element.

For the high voltage relay I will be using a relay SSR 24-220V DC, 40A. This relay can be sources via Ebay as well but often ships directly from Asia. I was able to find a distributor in the US and ordered directly from them for around $18 shipped.

I currently have this heater installed in my car and am able to get 100 degree heat from my dash vents while only pulling 14amps from my pack. I will post detailed pictures as well as a wiring diagram soon.

Ben

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 4th, 2008 at 6:52 pm and is filed under EVBIMMER. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.