Zerostart Cartridge Engine Block Heater Kit - 202W - Fascia Mount Plug

Video Transcript for Manufacturer Discussion with Zerostart about Engine Heaters

Hey there, neighbors, Kevin here with etrailer and today we have our friends from Zerostart here. We have Ian and he's gonna be telling us a little bit more about their company and their product offerings. Thank you, Phillips and Temro, the company, Zerostart, the brand, 105 years old, headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In terms of the products we offer, the genesis of the company was anything to heat fluids, so block heaters. We have cartridge heaters, oil pan heaters. We just installed a cartridge heater this morning in one of the bays.

If you're driving a Toyota product, you'll use a cartridge-style heater. No need to bang out a frost plug or lose coolant. This goes into a dry hole in the casting of the engine and then you route the harness out through the front of the vehicle, plug it in, and it'll give you an efficient cold start in the morning. Basically anything to heat an engine in cold weather we manufacture, so immersion heating, cartridge heating. We have heat magnets that can go on the side of an engine or an oil pan that'll help heat, get the vehicle started in cold weather.

We have battery heaters, we have wraps that go around the battery heater. They can be thermostatically controlled. We also have silicone pad heaters that can sit underneath the battery, and supplementary heat, we have things like silicone pad heaters that will go on the bottom of an oil pan and that'll give you supplementary heat if you can install an immersion oil pan heater or a clamp-on heater. One other thing we offer for light duty and automotive applications is an interior car warmer. Very popular in places like Alaska, the Midwest or Canada.

It can be routed out through the grill of the car and plugged in at the same time you plug your block heater in. It'll keep snow off the car and keep frost off the windows so you have a quick start and the cabin will be warm when the person gets in the vehicle. All right, and we also have Vaughn here as well. Can you tell me a little bit more about our battery wraps and some of these other styles of heaters What would- Sure, so the battery wrap, this is actually a resistive-type heater. It wraps around the battery itself to bring the battery up to temperature.

In cold conditions, batteries lose a lot of cold cranking capability, so what you wanna do, because the cranking requirements of an engine go up in cold, the output of the battery goes down, so the idea is to keep the battery warm, allow that max capacity at really cold conditions so that you get the best startability possible. Now, I have had a little bit of experience with battery wraps. Is this one where I can overwrap it, kind of wrap around itself, or is this one where we would need to make it the exact size of that battery So you don't wanna overlap these. The big thing is, it's better to have it too short than too long. If you overwrap and you have take a chance of having heat retention and causing the resistive wire element to fail, so really what we'd rather do is have it a little short, have a little gap 'cause you're gonna get a lot of heat into that battery and still get that battery up to a nice warm startability temperature. So the other key is, is not using these in really warm weather. Heat is the killer of batteries, so you want 'em to maintain less than 95 degrees Fahrenheit on that battery temp, hence the reason a lot of the OEMs have relocated the batteries out of the engine compartment, or put 'em in their own separate container in the engine compartment to keep that temperature down so you can maintain that product life. So the silicone wrap is designed to go around a diesel fuel filter, a spin-on cartridge, a spin-on canister, metal filter only, not designed for plastic, and what this is designed to do, this can run off a 12, 24 or 120-volt, is to warm the fuel in the fuel filter so at initial start, you get warm fuel, you get that paraffin wax to re-solidify so it'll flow through the filter. So five, 10 minutes, 15 minutes before you start your truck, you turn this on, allow it to warm up, you got nice warm fuel, that paraffin wax re-solidified so it'll flow through the filter, not plug the filter up, so these are really slick for over-the-road trucks and larger engines. Well, that is gonna do it for our look at Zerostart's product line here, but if you still have questions, I know you probably still have some when it comes to fitment, we can definitely help you out. Definitely feel free to reach out to us via our Ask the Experts link, leave a comment on this video, or a phone call to our customer service department and we would be happy to help you out on your journey in keeping that engine nice and warm for ya, so that being said, thank you, Vaughn, thank you, Ian. Great to have you here. Thank you. Thank you for your knowledge and for helping pass it along to our neighbors. Glad to do it. Thank you.