Got a text from Mrs Piper - she’s expecting a cold snap tonight and went out to plug in the car. Can’t find the plug for the block heater, which should be dangling out of the front grille?
Yeah, about that.
When I took the car into Honda to get the snow tires on last week, they helpfully pointed out that the plug is missing and I should bring it back for a new cord to be installed.
“ Missing plugs are fairly common if someone drives away with the heater plugged in,” says the young Honda guy, helpfully. “Maybe it happened in the last hard cold last spring, so you wouldn’t notice it, if warm weather started soon after.”
“Yes, I suppose that’s possible,” I say, with a tone of voice suggesting an interesting intellectual problem. “I don’t remember it happening, but I suppose it could happen that way.”
Who am I kidding?!? Of course that’s how it happened!!
EVs (Teslas, at least) don’t allow you to shift into gear when they’re still plugged in.
It’s pretty obvious that internal combustion cars, which don’t typically have lockouts for either the fuel nozzle or block heater plug, aren’t really viable for the majority of Americans, and will remain a niche market for the foreseeable future.
After a mere 5 years, the Magnoplug Kickstarter magnetic blockheater cord is supposed to ship this month, now branded as Voltsafe. They had a few (many) issues obtaining regulatory certification for mains voltage interconnect with exposed contacts. I got an email asking to confirm my shipping address, but no actual shipping notice yet. The latest update also made it sound as if Federated Coop will be carrying them once they’ve finished shipping to backers.
family story is dad whos home on leave from nam and mom were so bombed on homeade 7&7’s and thai pot that neither one noticed the drive in speaker was still attached to the window…
base mp was chatting about it saying they’d gotten a weird complaint saying an army guy was responsible … dad sort of remembered they went to the drive-in the night before and checked the window … he sent it to them in a box with no return address an unsigned apology letter and a fifty cause he still was a ministers son and felt guilt …
missed the edit …the family story is dad whos home on leave from Nam and mom were so bombed on homemade 7&7’s and thai pot that they brought in neither one noticed the drive-in speaker was still attached to the window…
fort ord base mp’s was chatting about it saying they’d gotten a weird complaint saying "an army guy driving like a bat outta hell " was responsible which could of been half of the area … dad sort of remembered they went to the drive-in the night before and checked the window … he sent it to them in a box with no return address an unsigned apology letter and a fifty cause he still was a ministers son and felt guilt … the other thing that’s notable was supposedly i was conceived before they left …
You’re not the only idiot who has done that. This past summer, before our first RV trip, I plugged in the shore power cord to make sure the coach batteries were charged. I promptly forgot about it. Went out, got in the rig, and backed down the driveway. I was almost into the street before I saw the large bright yellow cord trailing me. Luckily, it had just pulled the plug out of the outlet instead of pulling the outlet off the garage wall, and it didn’t rip the plug connection out of the side of the RV, and I didn’t manage to drive over it. Couldn’t believe my good luck. :smack:
Motorcycles have interlocks so the engine turns off if the kickstand is down and the clutch is released while the bike is in gear. They also prevent starting unless the clutch is in or the transmission is in neutral. Many manual cars won’t start unless the clutch is pressed, even if the transmission is in neutral.
It doesn’t seem like it would be too hard to design a circuit so that the starter won’t get power if the block heater is energized, or the transmission interlock won’t release if the heater is plugged in. I mean, that circuit already exists in most cars. Just run a wire from the block heater to the brake pedal, and then the car can’t shift out of park until the block heater is unplugged (you probably have to put in a resistor and diode or something to make it all work together).
This is one of these arrangements where there is literally a mains cable wired into the motor with the plug dangling out, that you then plug into a wall?
Here we run with a different arrangement, where there is a socket in the grill or bumper, and you get a cable which plugs into the mains power in the wall and then plugs into the car at the other end.
So if you drive off the cable typically unplugs at one end or the other. Sometimes you find the cable sat there when you come home, and sometimes you have to spring a few bucks for a new cable if it was trailing under the car and got dislodged somewhere on the road. But usually you don’t have to install anything new.