And as anyone who knows me can attest, I truly, sincerely hate Winter. Not just a passing, "Ugh, it's cold out today." I tend to repeat my mantra of, "STUPID WINTER!" for about six months of the year, even when it's not even in season.
Fortunately, modern automobile heating systems are really quite efficient, despite their relative simplicity of design that has gone somewhat unchanged for the last 70 years or so.
It's a simple matter of filling an engine with a water/coolant mix, letting it circulate through the engine to not only cool it, but capture the radiant heat from the combustion chambers. This heated water, in turn, runs through a heat exchanger under your dashboard, and creates heat when you turn on the vent system in your car and allow a fan to blow that hot air through the vents and onto your toesies.
I especially like it when the car's been warmed up a while, and some of that heat finds its way into the car's interior. My friend, Jake, once referred to it as, "Engine Heat."
Sometime after college, he and I were driving around in his old blue Cutlass sedan. We were marvelling at the chilly air that night, and he turned to me and said, "Don't worry - we'll have Engine Heat soon." Within a few moments, the car started warming up nicely. "How AWESOME is Engine Heat, man???" he proclaimed, as he looked at me with an excited, wild-eyed stare.
We both cracked up into hysterics, but to this day, I don't hit that heater button without thinking about Jake's Engine Heat comment.
On the flip side of the Engine Heat coin is my friend, Brian. He grew up in Iowa, which gets bitterly awful cold winters. For a time, he drove an old Subaru, which he'd purchased in late Fall. "The car ran GREAT," he told me once. "Except it never had heat."
But Brian was easy-going (and not mechanically minded), and simply bundled up to compensate for the lack of heat. One day, however, the car started acting funny, so he pulled it into a service station.
"You're out of antifreeze," said the mechanic. "I'll put some in for you."
Magically, the old Subaru suddenly had heat! It turned out that the bitterly cold weather was enough to keep the engine cool. "I just loved it that much more after that," Brian recalls.
But complain as I might, I'm often glad that I don't have to deal with the heating system in my parents' VW Beetle. They had a late '50s model painted gold that they used to run around Kansas City, Missouri in the late '60s. They loved the car, but often reminded me that no matter how cold I thought it was outside, I never had to scrape frost from the INSIDE of the windshield like they did.
Fortunately here on the east coast, it's been fairly warm the last few days. I've even had the windows down, and the sunroof open to glean a bit of Vitamin D from the ambient sunlight. And it feels like any day now, I should be able to pack away the ice scraper.
My only fear is that getting excited about warmer weather will only mean that there's more to come. In fact, there was a report of snow for tonight.
Maybe next February 2nd, I'll try poking my head out of the sunroof, like Punxsutawney Phil. If you hear me complain about my nose freezing up, expect six more weeks of Winter.
Either way, expect me to keep complaining until about May!
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