Bay heat

[busproject]

I'm a newbie here, but when I had to keep an old car warm to start, I got the most bang for the watt by using a dipstick heater, and I didn't even run it all night, I had it on a timer to kick on a few hours before morning, but with a big diesel, you would probably run it all night. That allowed me to crank a lot quicker because the oil was thinner, and that's all I needed. They also make magnet mount oil pan heaters, and ones you can glue on permanent. If I needed to keep the coolant warm too, I would replace one of the freeze plugs with a coolant heater. That's what I have on my diesel now, and it only takes about two hours powered up to do the trick. You don't want to heat all the surroundings, you want to focus the heat where it's needed, and no more, because that costs you bucks. Two other notes:

One time it got down to record lows and the coolant block heater and the cold-start air intake heater on the diesel wasn't enough, and I NEEDED to get going. I fired up the backpacker stove to max and put it about a foot under the oil pan, hood closed, stayed there to watch it with a fire extinguisher close by. Took 90 minutes, that was one fuel bottle (about a pint) and that was just enough to get it started. Didn't have a pan or dipstick heater at the time, went with what I had.

Military diesels use a cold-start assist that blows flame right into the intake manifold. Runs off diesel fuel. Diesels always run excess air at idle so this does not use up all the oxygen. There is NO temperature that a military diesel with decent compression will not start at. I'm in a temperate climate now, but if not, I would consider rigging the same setup for my truck using a sidewalk torch and propane, I'd have to tap into the tubing between the intercooler and intake and rig a switcher valve. When I couldn't get that same diesel started another time (after sitting for months), I pulled off the tubes and blew flame into the intake while someone cranked it, nothing. I knew something was wrong, I thought the engine was toast, perhaps no compression. Was simply a bad fuel shutoff solenoid (was drawing fuel from a test tank but then returning it all to the truck tank, I thought it was consuming fuel but it wasn't).