My dad’s car is having issues with his heater in his car and until I can raise the cash to get it repaired I saw a mini heater/defroster you can use inside your car and operates off the cig lighter. Has anyone tried these? Do they really work and if so how well? Right now I have zero heat so even a little heat would be an improvement.
I haven’t used one of these, but I can give you some facts to think about.
Small, 110VAC, space heaters are usually about 1500 watts. I have tried one of these inside a car inside of a garage. It took it a very long time to warm the interior at all.
The cigarette lighter socket is limited to a maximum of 20A at 12VDC. I would suspect that the heaters you saw are probably 15A. Anyway, even if they are 20, then that is only 240 watts of heat. I bet that you would hardly even notice that it was on.
The only thing that works half ways is a small fan run from the cigarette lighter and positoned to blow air over the windshield, and educe the condensation.
Don’t count on the alernator or battery to jeat your car or winshield.
They are not worth beans, dress warm and keep a scraper inside.
Anybody had a beetle in snow country back in the day, same thing.
I use one on my 1982 Volvo because the heater fan bearings are almost gone, so I use the heater fan very sparingly. The dash-mounted heater puts out a small amout of warm air that can’t really defrost a seriously cold windshield, but it will eventually remove condensation on the inside of the windshield, which is better than nothing. However, my wife does not like the visual clutter that the device causes, and she always pulls it off the dash on the rare occasions that she drives my car.