The story is that my residence parking don’t have plug ins, but I only need to use my car once a week. It’s imperative that I use my block heater because I drive a little diesel VW Jetta, and up here the nightly temp can dip well below -30 C (-22 F). SO, I reckon that I could buy a portable booster pack, the type with an outlet, put a timer in it for say, two hours before morning departure, and plug it into the block heater.
Issues: I don’t know how much heating time a portable booster like that would put out, and whether or not it would be enough to make a difference. Also, you could guarantee that someone would jack that setup if it were just left sitting infront of my car, easy solution would be split the block heater cabel and run it back to the cabin, and just place the setup at the feet of the passenger side. Problems being, fire risk, gas build-up. Any forseeable problems folks?
The problem is it won’t work. You can’t raise the temperature enough with the energy in a battery to keep a engine startable in that situation. Save the money.
You will need a 110 volt source, be it extension cord or portable generator.
-22F with a diesel, unless you can get grid power to it consider selling it and buying a gas car and/or moving.
I don’t beleive that a battery power will be enough, how many watts do these puppies consume anyway. You could easially hook up a 1000 W inverter to the battery and go out ahead of time to swtich it on, but in that cold weather your battery won’t be able to supply much and start your car.
I have seen very small gererators that you could probaly put under the hood so no one would walk away with, but again you would have to get there early to start it.
Really just sell the car and make things easy.
I can think of a setup that might work:
Use two batteries: a regular lead acid battery and a deep-cycle lead acid battery. The regular car battery is used to start your engine, and is charged by your existing alternator. The deep-cycle battery is used to power the heater, and is charged by *another * alternator and regulator circuit. For this to work, of course, you would have to run the engine long enough to charge the deep-cycle battery.