@ lostjuan: Man that is true BMW still does not have block heaters, they run synthetic oil and good for -35 C, personal experience, also the oil in these engines tend to stay up in galleries due to construction, if you shut down the engine try hearing the oil rundown noise, u wont hear it.
I see u twitter ....I didn't know about the galleries thing, interesting. I run
25,000 mile amzoil product so I know the value of PAO's and how great they are. That's how I got
420,000 miles out of the 97 astro.
Wouldn't the unheated garage you mentioned be warmer than outside air temps?
Yup Problem with unheated garages is that they are usually attached to a house and the cheapest
houses here run $230k that is a real expensive engine preheater. Plus you would probably not want
to live a neighbourhood with houses that cheap. I just want heat in car after a couple of blocks.
The chevrolet oil pan heater doesn't even turn on til the on til -18F which is pretty
much of no use to me and from what I understand it wouldn't provide any heat in the cabin any
quicker anyway.
I have learned more about how the remote start works so that may solve
the problem somewhat. Currently on a WARM day about 32F from a cold start I get good heat with
in 7 mins with recycle activated and running the car at about 3-4000 rpm. So that means the cabin is
warm by the time I get to the destination and I will take another 10 minutes to warm up indoors.
Which from what I can recall is the same as me running the car via the remote for 10 minutes when it's
-18F out except because of the ambient temp I take even longer to warm up once indoors. Their is
plenty of heat once it up to temp.
Speaking of that I have found that the normal running temp for every GM product I have owned is
one to two segments below the middle of the dial on the temp gauge, Oddly enough I came
out the other night and the fans were running on the rad and the temp
gauge was at a quarter, there was heat in the cabin but not a whole lot. In this process I also
noticed that the american brochures have No numbers on the temp gauges. Where my cruze and
the cdn brochures do. That said I really don't think the number to be all that accurate. They could
replace the numbers with "not hot" and "too hot" and have the same accuracy.