I thought that the heat generated by the engine is passed?

The heater in your car operates off hot engine coolant which is circulated through a heater core. The core is basically a small radiator. Most older cars used a heater valve to shut off the flow of hot coolant when heat was not desired. Most modern era cars circulate hot coolant all the time and a…

And for the very old Beetles… like my '61, for example. {:slight_smile: The heat you’re using in the cabin heater is being generated whether you have the heater on or not. If the heater isn’t on, it simply gets dissipated by the car’s radiator along with the rest of the heat your engine generate…

Didn’t the Corvair also have a gas heater option? In response to the OP’s question, as others have said, this is just heat being wasted by the engine anyway. The only difference is instead of it being dissipated into the outside air by the car’s radiator, it’s being dissipated into the cabin throu…

I wonder if this question is more properly stated: “Does the cold weather cause worse fuel economy because you have to heat the car?” - and the answer to that question is, Yes! - as there is more fuel consumed in order to bring everything up to operating temperature.

I keep the heater off when the engine is cold just so the engine warms up as fast as possible, once the engine reaches operating temperature, I use the heater. The waste heat has to be dissipated anyway so it might as well heat the car. Using the defrost or defog setting will turn on the AC and th…

The heat for the cabin in modern cars is the coolant heated by the engine. This heat is free in that otherwise thrown away into the atmosphere through the radiator. There were, in past years, car heaters that used gasoline. A heater used to be an option. Stewart-Warner made a gasoline heater that…

The amount of extra gas used by the heater is negligible. During warm up, the coolant goes to the heater first, so theoretically, it takes longer to warm up the engine and get off the rich setting on the fuel supply. My bet is that it would be nearly impossible to actually measure it.

Not sure just which useage of gas the op has in mind. As others have said , the heater is not a gasoline powered unit in any way…it’s hot water aka coolant. or – Does it use ‘‘additional’’ gas to run it ?. NO, never has, the coolant just flows the same. These days , most vehicles do not even …

Quoting oblivion “Didn’t the Corvair also have a gas heater option?” I think the gas heater was only available for the first year of Corvair production, 1960. In fact I THINK it was the only system available that year. I had one in the late '60s. The gas heater was much better than the later oi…

Does car heater use gas to generate heat?

General Discussion

PvtPublic January 12, 2015, 6:28pm 7

Of course the heater uses gas. Just in a sort of round about way. The heater uses hot coolant flowing through the heater core. To do this it is required that the engine be running which requires gas/fuel. With out a running engine the would be no heat generated to make the hot coolant and the water pump would not be spinning to provide the flow.

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Does car heater use gas to generate heat?

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