Hi all, 2nd post in as many minutes!

Would welcome your comments on a couple of issues that I experience in cold weather:

1) when starting the car in very cold conditions and putting on the seat heaters and window heaters (front and rear), the battery light will come if the car is idling for a few minutes (normally annoyingly at the 1st set of lights 200 yards from home). If I turn the engine off and back on the light goes off and normally stays off. Any ideas?

2) How long does it take for your engine to heat up? Today for example, I was stuck in traffic on the motorway and the engine did not heat up (the gauge hardly moved off the bottom) for about 30 minutes until I got into flowing traffic. Is this to be expected from a diesel?

Welcome your thoughts!

Steve

 

steve, please keep in mind that while you have a fairly capable alternator in your car, by putting on the dash blower, the seat heaters, rear defroster, etc, you are putting a very large load on the alternator. At idle, the alternator can not output enough power to sustain all these loads. Hence why you are getting the battery light. Something you can try is while sitting at the local light, shift the car into Neutral and then gently press on the gas pedal to get the engine RPMs up to normal highway RPMs. I bet you will find that the battery light will go out while the RPMs are up. Once you let off, the battery light will come back on. This is just proving that the alternator is being overloaded.

The short of the story with the alternator is that it is only able to output about 50-60% of it max output at idle. So, this put you at about 70ish amps possible. Just to run the motor takes 10 amps, each seat heater is about 20 amps, the dash blower in high is 25 amps, the rear defroster is about 20 amps. As you can see, the total current draw starts building up quickly.

As for the temp of the engine not coming up like one would think, this is a function of how warm it is outside. If you are down in the -10C range, yes, what you are experiencing can happen. This is a "downside" to a diesel engine because it actually has a lot less waste heat than a petrol engine. So, when you start running the dash heater full bore, you are pulling all the heat out of the coolant and actually exceeding the waste heat the motor is making.

You can try running a little bit of cardboard in the radiator to minimize the amount of air that can make it to the radiator (same idea as the covers you see on the large trucks/Lorries you see around town). Just make sure to remove it once the temps start to warm back up.

 

Thanks Thermo! I suspected this was the answer, the only issue is that the battery light remains on, even after revving or normal running. Never sure if this is continuing to drain the battery or just the light sticking on. Guess I will have to keep the revs up in idle or do without the heated seat...then again, love my heated seats so perhaps I can live with the battery light being on!

 

I think you might want to have alternator tested because it should be able to power everything on the car without the light coming on. It might be fine but it could be borderline on the output. Your battery could also be week and not taking a full charge. Just my thoughts.

 

I would agree. You would think that with all the testing cars go through before they are released something like getting stuck in traffic with everything powered would have to be part of that. Plus, if something like that would be normal there would be a lot more people posting about it. Something isn't quite up to snuff is my guess; probably nothing real serious either.