this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024
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TBF you can turn on an ICE car and let it warm up a bit before you drive it. Some ICE cars also allow you to remotely pre-start or there are after market options so you can use an app to do exactly that. Hell, Russian far east they simply leave the car on for the cold months.
It's just that it's incredibly wasteful/polluting.
But you cannot do that in the garage (unless you like huffing exhaust fumes).
And if you spend a couple hundred bucks on insulation, you don’t need to preheat anything in your garage either.
Only goes so far. The interface between the garage door and the frame of the house is difficult to seal perfectly. Always going to be drafty. Also, you can't put particularly thick insulation on the garage door.
I live in a cold climate. I have a 2 stall garage and the north facing insulated doors seal very well to hold in the heat. In fact the whole garage is insulated and I even heat it. Holding the building a 45F it takes 2 years between refills with a 200 gallon LP tank. And this is with temperatures than hit -40F over night with highs still well below 0F for several days or weeks at a time. And even unheated, that garage will never drop below freezing over an entire winter.
If you a drafty doors, you are doing something wrong. Fix them.
You can't open a garage door remotely? I can.
Exhaust fans are not new or unapproachable tech.
They are also not a common fixture of garages.
But they are a life and death safety device in the scenario you describe. Hvac equipment.
The majority of garages I've seen have a garage door so the fumes don't just build up in the garage.
Which means that your home then has increased heat loss because the garage door is open.
Even if the garage is attached, there will be an exterior door between the garage and the house proper that will be as heat loss resistant as your front door. So I don't know how you get anymore heat loss than you would from any exterior door in the house. In fact, that door will have LESS heat loss than your front door because it's shielded from the elements that your front door isn't.
Would you have a large impact on your home from having your garage open for 15 minutes or so every day?
Eh, I don't even have a garage, and my place stays warm just fine. It's just a few minutes
What the hell are you talking about? Listen to yourself
Honestly I was half joking, but seriously don't most homes have extra insulation between the garage and the rest of the house? Are you guys heating your garages?
They do. A garage with a closed door acts like an air gap, meaning you get some extra insulation for free. It's far from perfect, as the garage door itself can't have particularly thick insulation, and the interface between the door and the frame is difficult to seal completely. Still, even an uninsulated garage with a closed door will typically be a bit warmer than the outside in the winter.
What's special about the door or do you mean just opening it? If the latter, that still won't prevent it from collecting at the ceiling and you'd better hope you remembered to open the door.
Which actually makes it illegal in some countries, too
Is illegal in my city. You'd never know it by walking around in the morning.
Welcome to my morning walk with the dogs every morning where its colder then 35F. Every fucking car in my neighborhood does this bullshit and when there's little to no wind, all that exhaust doesn't go anywhere and just sits at ground level where I get to breathe it in for an hour. It stick at the back of my throat for the rest of the day. Add to that snowblowers after even less than an inch of snow.
I can't fucking wait for EVs to gain market share. Its fucking disgusting what my neighbors find acceptable.
The only enjoyment I find in this situation is people that back into their garages then warm up their car while still parked in their garage, spewing that exhaust into there instead of outside. I'll never understand what brain logic leads them to that solution but it's the same people doing it every morning.
Edit: I should add that the other great thing about people doing this is the rise of car thefts since some of these people also just turn their car on, leave the keys in the car, leave it unlocked and go back indoors because it's cold
Yup, this is why the practice of idling a car to heat it up is rightfully illegal in many places.
IIRC you can fit an ICE vehicle with an electric engine block heater which will use mains electricity to heat the water and circulate it through the engine. So you run an extension cord out to your car, leave it plugged in and turn it on half an hour before you leave.
Yep it's what people in northern Sweden have been doing for probably at least 40 years now.
It's not good for the car, either. Cars aren't meant to idle; cars are made to have all fluids moving & the car rolling down the road.
I treat my car to a gentle warm-up when it's cold outside; I start the car & start driving, but only 20-30 mph for the first 5-8 minutes. All the components of the car are gently being used, are slowly warming up, together. I think my car runs better for it.
My grandpa would do that back in the sixties. Luckily some things do change.