Portable Car Heater!

Hello, my friend advice to me to use Portable Car Heater - namely Schumacher 1225 12V 150W Ceramic Heater and Fan. He says that it is good for car in cold weather (in winter). So parallel i hearing that this car heaters are harmful for your car.
So who is right, and should I buy it?

I wouldn’t get one. It’ll place a heavy load on your battery (150w/12v = 12.5 amps), and 150W is pretty small output for a heater.

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Thanks for your opinion! It is important to me!

Is there some reason you’re considering using one of these electric heaters instead of using the car’s heater? You can use the car’s heater system to get heat from your engine without putting a strain on your electrical system.

If you’re really desperate, you could buy yourself a few of these. I just used mine for the first time, and it worked pretty well.

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I’m with @Whitey. What’s up with the cold car?

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@cdaquila

:wink:

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I think you are correct about being spam.

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No if it was spam, the English would be better. This is a person new to the cold climate-likely Minnesota. At any rate I agree with Texases. They don’t work very well and drain the electrical system. I tried a similar when my diesel had a head gasket issue and didn’t like to heat in traffic in Minnesota. Better off to wear heavy socks or get the problem fixed. An extra fan though to clear the windshield might be necessary sometimes if the heater is not working, but that’s it.

Maybe. Maybe not. A lot of spam is coming in from other countries. The government of India recently broke a ring of scam artists there who were preying on victims worldwide. They arrested something like 70 people, and their investigation is still ongoing.

For anyone considering opening the product link, I recommend against it. It could have dire consequences.
For anyone who actually has a car heating problem of some type, describe it and we’ll try to help.

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I did a search for the product by title, and it seems to be a legitimate product, available at Amazon.com for $16.

But I agree, 150 watts is nothing in so far as heat output is concerned.

A couple winters ago I tried one sold at Walmart because my car at the time had poor heat. Turns out just needed a higher temp thermostat. That heater at Walmart didn’t do much. I would not recommend a Walmart heater.

One caution w/portable heaters. Don’t get the heater too close to the windshield. It can crack the glass.

Car Talk Lackey
Agree with Carolyn!

OK, what did she say?

Car Talk Lackey

Spam

4 people have clicked on that link. We need to have a talk about internet safety.

Hover your mouse over the link. Look at the bottom left part of your browser. That URL is where the link will take you.

In this case, it’s “gadgets-reviews.com”

Hm.

That sounds a lot like gadgetreview.com, which is a popular (30k view per day) consumer gadget review blog.

Let’s do a little more sniffing. A whois search returns a Russian registrar and an anonymized Russian registrant.

So, what have we learned? This is a fake website in Russia that sounds a lot like a real website, linked off of a car forum based on a US radio show by a guy who doesn’t speak English very well and who joined the site mere moments before he posted this - i.e., didn’t even take the time to look around or see how things work here.

Now, I’ll grant you that it’s remotely possible that this is all innocent, but the overwhelming likelihood from a security standpoint is that this is a site that’s looking to do something nefarious to whoever stumbles into it. Don’t click.

And @cdaquila might want to disable that link before it gets someone in trouble.

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Link is disabled. The rest of the discussion seems helpful to someone who would consider a portable heater.

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If you live in Alaska, you can’t do without the auxiliary heater. The other parts of the country don’t normally have anything extra. If those things aren’t sold everywhere around you, the temperatures are probably not semi-arctic.

Thanks for the lesson Shadowfax. I had no idea. Those Russians are so crafty.

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@VOLVO_V70,

Allow me to interpret:

:slight_smile: