Video Transcript for What to Know About the Kat's Heaters Custom Fit Engine Block Heater

Speaker 1: Today we're going to be taking a look at Kat's Heaters custom fit cartridge style engine block heater. You'll want to refer to the fit guide here etrailer.com to determine which block heater is going to be appropriate for your vehicle and the engine. These cartridge style heaters are custom fit for your engines, and just slide right into the block, and transfer heat through the block to help warm up the coolant, to allow for easier starting and quicker heat up times. So what this means for you is you don't have to worry about difficult starts, making it for a longer time in the morning to get started, or potentially miss work. The people who can benefit from this most are ones that drive diesel engines. Diesels use glow plugs to heat the engine.

However, sometimes it can take several key cycles to get the engine warm enough to properly start. Having a block heater on it like this will help ensure that it will fire right up. Additionally, your engine is going to heat up faster since its had a headstart, so you're going to have heat coming out your events faster on your way to work. It features a five foot cord that can be routed up to your grill area, where it can be mounted permanently.So whenever you want to use it, you can simply plug an extension cord in, plug it into the wall, and it'll start to heat up your block. The heater produces 400 watts of power.

And this is pretty substantial, so this is going to warm it up fairly quickly and evenly throughout. Even though it does come from a central point. It's made of a durable cast aluminum, so it's going to be lightweight and corrosion resistant. We're under our vehicle now. We're going to show you a typical installation.

Looking at the backside of our engine block, now the backside isn't always where they're going to be, but it will be on your engine block. You are looking for a cavity. You can see ours right up here. Now we'll take our heater. We're going to insert it in the hole.

It's a good idea to take some compressed air or something and blow out any dirt and debris in the hole. And then also coat your heater with silicone. This will help transfer heat better, as well as keep out moisture from getting inside.We're not going to be coating ours with silicone today for demonstration purposes, but afterwards you'd simply slide it in. And that's what it'll look like when you've got it fully inserted. As you can see, it's flush up against the block, and our clip has clipped around the side of the block there, and this will ensure that it can't come back out. Next you'll just route the wire up to the front of the vehicle. A good place for it is behind the grill, where you can tuck it back out of the way, and you won't be able to see it, but you can access it to plug it in when you need it. Whenever you're routing your wire, you want to avoid any moving objects such as your steering or drive train components. And any excessively hot objects, such as your exhaust. So you can see here we've got our cord routed to the front of the vehicle right in the center.We can now plug it in with an extension cord, and start heating up our engine. And then if we're not using it, we can easily tuck it back out of the way, and you don't even know it's there. There is no on or off switch, as soon as you plug it in it begins to heat. Now we do have ours on a lift. You'll most likely be doing this on the ground. We've had it plugged in for about 20 minutes. Let's check our temperatures. At the plug, we're measuring about 110 degrees. You can see as we take a measurement on the side of our block, we're at about 100 degrees, so it's spreading pretty well throughout our engine. So as you can imagine, if it was 19 degrees outside, this would be like starting your vehicle on a warm summer day. And that completes our look at Kat's Heaters custom fit cartridge style engine block heaters.