The Toyota Landcruiser Owners Club

[Andyk80]

Has anybody installed a mains powered block heater in the 1kz-te before?  I've got a sump heater awaiting fitting, but I've found very little info on coolant heating for this engine (mine's a 1996).

There's quite a few splice-in coolant heater types knocking about, but from what I've read these are anything from decent to useless, and a heater that fits into the core plug should be much more effective.

Has anybody fitted one (or even found one) for their truck before?

[Google]

[diggerdave]

I've not heard of this before. What is the purpose? Is this a cold climate thing?
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1997 KZJ90 3.0d, 2" suspension lift, 235/85/16 Cooper STT Pros. 217k hard miles

[Andyk80]

It is indeed.  I'm prepping the truck for a drive to Finland in winter.  The sump heater is for thinning the oil, the block heater for warming the block.  Basically makes it easier to start.

I've drawn a complete blank on the in block heater so far, so I think I'll take a punt on the Chinese coolant/pump heaters and figure out how best to insulate the sump.

I'll post back on here once I've got something going just in case anyone else does something similar.

[DaveWall]

Webasto from new disco maybe? wouldn't be too difficult to plumb it in...

[Andyk80]

I've gone for a coolant/pump style heater, albeit a mains powered one from Calix.

I do have a Webasto diesel heater knocking about but that's quite a chunky piece of kit, and it's earmarked for the Uaz anyway.

The Calix is a 500w heater, but small enough to fit down by the cold side of the turbo, and their system is pretty slick and modular.  I'm starting off with the heater and a small battery charger, and I'm planning to expand it in a couple of months to add a charger for the second battery.  I'm not bothering with the sump/pad heater at this point, the thinking being if I can insulate the sump well enough, an overnight run with the coolant heater and the battery charge and the heat that generates should be enough.

I searched everywhere for the in-block type heaters, and there are some generic ones, but I don't fancy removing a core plug and then finding out the heater I've got is too long, or the thread isn't quite right.  

If anyone's interested, I'll get some photos on this post once I've finished the install.  Waiting for some remaining hose parts and a cable fitting kit, but I'm hoping to have it in and test it in the next week or two.

[DaveWall]

I would love to see what you end up doing....

They have plug in electric blanket sort of things in Canada shaped to sit against the engine block....

[andy]

Have you seen this Block Heater
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It's Not a Bl**dy Jeep it's a Landcruiser
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[Andyk80]

Haha, sorry Andy I completely missed your reply for some reason.  No I didn't find that when I searched, typically.  I'm quite pleased with what I went with in the end though.  I suspect it's ultimately less hassle than the core plug solution, at least with the engine still in anyway.

First time I've posted photos, and from Flickr so hope they work...

Ok, I ended up building a system based on a Swedish modular system by a company called Calix.  For the kit they sell (battery chargers, block heaters, in cab heaters etc), everything is dead simple to connect together with a standardised set of nice chunky well made cabling.

The system starts at an inlet cable, which has an IP44 exterior plug to mount somewhere on the body.  I went for mounting on the front right of the bumper as it's easy to get to and hopefully a cable sticking up off the ground like that will be hard to miss.  From research, I've seen lots of people saying they've forgotten their heaters were plugged in and have driven off only to damage the system, so I abandoned my original idea of mounting it down low under the bumper.

20220903_104359 by Andy Knight, on Flickr

Simple to fit, just took a holesaw and that was pretty much it.  With the headlamp unit out, it's easy to route the cable in by the battery and fuse board as well.

20220903_104629 by Andy Knight, on Flickr

I went with a 1 metre inlet cable, and connected it straight into the smaller sized Calix battery charger

20220903_134521 by Andy Knight, on Flickr

And then finally with an extension cable from the outlet of the battery charger into a Calix FCH500 heater.  

20220903_134530 by Andy Knight, on Flickr

I managed to bolt the heater with one of the brackets supplied directly onto the inner arch and route the return hose from the heater matrix into the heater inlet and then the heated outlet straight to the head.  The system wouldn't be able to work if the heater was set to cold, but I can't think of another simple place to mount it and get heated coolant straight to the head.  In fairness, there's no way I'll be running this system anywhere where the heating won't permanently be set to hot though, so I can live with it  

Another change I made at this point was to junk the metal lines to the rear heater.  It's entirely possible to see -30 and below where I'm going, and the metal lines would absolutely be a major heat sink, so when I removed and de-scaled the rear heater matrix, I replaced the lines entirely in new rubber.

The rubber then got wrapped in pipe lagging out of B&Q and then wrapped again in heat shielding wrap bound with exhaust grade metal tie wraps to protect it from the exhaust.

20220911_134147 by Andy Knight, on Flickr

I made some custom brackets from 2 mil thick aluminium strip, bent into shape and drilled/bolted to the studs that held the original metal hose mounts.  These hold the hoses completely out of the way now.

I did run around for about two weeks without the shielding wrap while I waited for it to be delivered and as I suspected, if the hoses aren't clamped into place as mentioned above, the pipe lagging will rub the exhaust joint and melt.  

Thankfully only a tiny portion of the lagging got touched (maybe about 5mm across and deep), but after fitting the shielding wrap I purposely drove it with the pipes in contact with the exhaust right up to temperature to make sure the wrap does its job (it does).

Honestly I don't know how effective wrapped pipe lagging will be against -30 and below, but I can't think of a better solution, at least not without spending loads.

[Andyk80]

Ok, photos seem to work ok so I'll do the rest.

I was initially going to run only with the block heater but I can't escape the feeling that a warmed block with 500w won't thin the oil down quickly enough, so I decided to add a thermostat controlled sump heater.

First thing to do was to disconnect the cable feeding the block heater and then add in a 3 way splitter.

20221001_185213

With that in place, I added a 0.5m Calix extension cable to reconnect the heater, then took a 1m extension cable and test routed it down towards the block.

20221001_185709

The heater I went for is a Phillips and Temro Wolverine - 3.75 x 4.25" which has a built in thermostat.  It's the closest size I could find with the thermostat and I didn't want a simple on/off one as it runs the risk of cooking the oil.  This is it being test placed.

20221001_190150

I had the sump heater very shortly after I bought the block heater, but unfortunately I found an oil leak from the level sender that needed fixing before I could move on to fitting it.  The sump needs to be completely dry and free from grease when you get to fitting it.

[Andyk80]

As the two systems aren't interchangeable, ultimately the only way to fit the sump heater is to cut and splice its feed cable with a Calix extension cable, which is dead simple to do.

These show the cable layout of the Calix plug

20221001_191229

20221001_191245

The Swedish use the same colour coding as we do - blue = neutral, brown = live.

The Calix cable has a strong metallic outer guard that can be pulled back once the cable is cut, and will then spring pretty much back into place after.  I chopped my cable, then pulled the guard back and used a pair of mole grips set to lightly grip the inner cable to keep the guard from springing back.

20221001_191937

The pad heater then has its own wiring layout which follows this diagram.

20221001_192238

I soldered the cables together as per the layouts.  You can see the ridges on the neutral cable here.

20221001_195220

Each solder connection had a heat shrink tube over it and the three were then completely run up and down with insulation tape.  Over the top of that I had some plastic spiral cable binding stuff to hand that I started from where the Calix guard stopped, and then ran up and down that with insulation tape as well, so the whole thing has multiple layers of protection.  The end result was this.

20221001_200711

At that point it was basically a case of sanding off the paint on the bottom of the sump, to an area of around 1cm outside of the sump heater area and thoroughly degreasing it to get shot of anything that could stop the heater from adhering to the surface.  The sanding is to ensure the heaters adhesive can key directly to the metal.

20221002_123605

The heater once connected into the system then has a cycle you need to run through of initially turning it on for a few seconds to activate the adhesive, then pressing it into place with a spreader not unlike fitting a phone screen protector.  Once it's on, it then gets run for another 10 seconds, and you then run all round the edges with a tube of provided silicone sealant to form a weather proof seal.  You then can't run the heater again until the silicone has naturally gone off.

20221002_124552

I mentioned previously some very tiny overlaps.  These I slightly bent the heater into as there was no other way, but as the overlaps were on the curving parts of the sump, they barely bend by a couple of mils, and they don't seem to stop it from working at all.

It was about 10 degrees when I fitted the sump heater.  Nothing by the standard of where this is intended for, but as you'd imagine, the engine metal was cold to the touch.  I did a test run of this system over a couple of hours, and it's a doddle to work with.  Plug it in, turn it on and that's basically it.

I came to the car a couple of hours later and you could feel the warmth radiating off the head.  Climbing underneath and the sump was pretty hot.  Starting the engine and while it was nowhere near operating temperature, the needle immediately climbed when I turned on the ignition.

I'm seriously thinking now about whether to add a sump heater to the auto box, and although it'll be next year for this, I'll certainly be adding a second battery charger at some point.

Apparently Calix do a thermostatic relay/splitter as well that will only activate when it drops below a certain temperature, so the intention is to have the system supply to the battery chargers whenever its connected, so I can easily hook the truck up if I'm not using it for a while, then if it ever did get really cold, the rest of the system would kick in and warm the engine up.