Can i use Portable Car Heater instead car heating system?

[MikeJJ]

Hello to all speakers! So my car heating system are broken a few days ago, and as now the weather is getting cold i need to heating my car inside. So i want to ask here, can i use the Portable Car Heater to heat my car without car heating system? Schumacher 1225 12V 150W Ceramic Heater and Fan or Mr. Heater F232000 ( http://www.gadgets-reviews.com/review/163-best-por... or one of them, Refine list of portable car heaters - just check if you want to advice to me some of them, this is not a mandatory action as the question of how - whether it is necessary to use Portable Car Heater) something like that. So it can replace car heating system or not, or better to repair it ? Thanks!

[t400ble]

Just fix it

[Trabi601]

They're all rubbish. Used to have one in a Mk1 Golf Cabrio that took forever to heat up. It barely made any difference.

[greenamex2]

I used to use these as race car screen demisters. They barely coped with doing that.

[TooMany2cvs]

t400ble said:

Just fix it

^ This.

When you say the heater's broken, what's broken? Just the fan? Or there's no heat coming from the matrix? If that, then you might want to check there's still water in the cooling system, and the thermostat's closing properly, before you kill the engine and it all becomes a bit academic.

[AW10]

Not again...

A 1000 watt heater would make a decent dent inside a the room of an average home.

1000 watts at 240 volts is a mere 4 and a bit amps - easy peasy for mains leccy. But reduce the voltage by a factor of 20 and the current would need to go up by a factor of 20 to get the same effect. 80 amps on top of all the other consumers in a car would overload most alternators and the battery would eventually die. And a ciggy lighter fuse is probably rated at 15 amps so you would get less than 1 fifth the output of a small home leccy heater. Hardly worth the bother.

Fix the car's heating system.