At 7:05 PM 1/17/5, leaking pen wrote: >agreed. you still have to HEAT the vehicle. and overnight, even the >best insulation is going to cool down over several hours. you simply >cant seal a car well enough
No one has suggested holding heat overnight. The problem is the HVAC power required to maintain steady state. Small horsepower cars here already can not do an adequate job of heating. It will be worse for hybrids, assuming they are highly energy efficient, which they may not be as marketed here. There is also the cold weather window defogging/deicing problem, which is really a matter of avoiding the requirement to heat the entire car to a fairly high temperature, plus maintain a bothersome draft, in order to be able to see to drive. This can be avoided by high heating just the space between glass layers. > >as for the luxury demand of cooling. > >bullshiat. i live in arizona. its safer to walk than take a car with >no ac on the hotter days. when the car is hot enough inside to bake >bread (not kidding, ive done it. very tasty sourdough.) cooling is >not a luxury. we have several deaths yearly caused by traffic >accidents caused by drivers of vehicles with no ac passing out from >heat exhaustion. Perspective helps! We don't have that problem here. 8^) We do have people driving down the road using an ice scraper on the inside of the windsheild though! Sometimes you see a car going down the road with someone (who must have been in a big hurry!) pearing through a small hole in the ice, scraping away. Visibility can be a serious problem. Only on very rare occasions do people freeze to death in their vehicles here though. An insulated vehicle can help that risk very much by holding heat long enough to get a rescue, and also possibly by being well enough insulated to heat to some degree with body heat. My wife and I have a highly insulated camper that we slept in without heat, in below freezing weather, and even just body heat kept it fairly comfortable overnight. A well insulated vehicle might be kept warm for a week by turning on the motor periodically. I've been stuck waiting for someone for several hours in Tok, Alaska in my car, and it got very cold within 10 minutes after the engine was shut off. Regards, Horace Heffner
