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Winterising technical tips


mike4444244

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Hi

Reading the posts by Deepmud et al has re-awakened my desire to go exploring, sadly work means a long trip is out of the question so I'd like to go to Northern Europe/Scandinavia, I'd like some advice on winterising and noticed there a few other members like Fridge who are thinking similar

Can we have a technical how-to thread by the members who live in these chilly places, as in what we need to do to avoid freezing to death or breaking the car, what's a luxury vs necessity etc

I'll go first... How cold can you go with a diesel TD5 before you have to start worrying about diesel waxing?

Thanks

Mike

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The answer to your question about waxing is "it depends on the grade of Diesel in your tank".

In cold-climate areas they have "winter" and "summer" diesel fuel - which are refined to different standards. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EN_590 for the standards for "EN590" Diesel as sold in Europe.

To be accepted as "Class 4" EN590 Arctic diesel it has to meet a Cold Filter Plugging Point of -44 Centigrade or colder.

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Where I live it gets down to -40. My 90 is nice and warm and comfortable. Better than any other car I've driven.

1) Get rid of the drafts. New seals, adjustments as needed.

2) Add insulation. The stock trucks are horrible.

3) Overhaul the heater. The heater flaps lose their sealing. The heater cores get plugged. If you can do some fabrication, add a better heater.http://www.red90.ca/rovers/Heater/heater.html

4) Get a Webasto coolant heater. Greatest winter device ever.

5) Use a decent winter diesel fuel conditioner to ensure you do not get gelling.

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I think you can buy petrol Eberspacher (air heaters), model starts with "B" rather than "D", not sure about the (Webasto) water heaters as they're mostly used to warm up diesels which are too efficient to make much heat. TBH having a small tank of diesel to run one is no biggie, they sip less than 0.5l/hour running absolutely flat out so a half-size jerry with a dip tube gets you 24 hours of volcanic activity, or 4-5x that in "simmer" mode.

I'll be coming back to this thread with various questions once the campbulance build gets underway, the current insulation/panelling is below par for numerous reasons (thin, old tech, plenty of "cold bridges") but we can't afford the space to bung 50mm thick celotex over every surface so some sort of compromise will have to be reached.

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I put together a webesto thermotop c/z about 2 winters ago and its a great bit of kit, one issue I was having was lack of heat from the cab heater though, I did some work on the heater pipes i.e. I found that they where a little crushed reducing the flow in the pipes, I re-hashed the heater pipes from the engine connections using some old discovery 1 heater pipes which are a tad larger in diameter and I was quite simply shocked at the difference this has made to heat now coming out of the heater. On the same vain of thought (thinking restrictions in the water feed system) I looked at the rest of the pipes and engine connections. I found that the rear engine pipe connection and the "pre heater" pipe that runs across the top of the cylinder head where badly fould with rust, which then brought my attention to the connector on the thermostat housing, which was also heavily fouled, after I cleaned it up I was shocked at how narrow this port actually was, so when I've got a spare thermostat housing in stock I'm planning on modifying the heater connector to open up the water way inside the thermostat body hopefully allowing a bit more flow to the heat exchanger...

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25mm celotex is as good as 6-8 inches of fibreglass, and available in many, many thicknesses that you could choose from to make your build easy.

That's handy as the ambulance currently has something in between, namely 25mm of fibreglass! :rolleyes:

I think we'll have to pull the interior skin off as it's 1980's school-bus-ceiling grade 3mm melamine rivnailed to a steel frame and it's been drilled and cut by previous owners. My feeling is stick some high grade 25-30mm insulation in the frame, possibly space the interior skin off the metal with something non-conductive to avoid cold-bridges, and use something a little more modern to skin the inside.

Floor is ~30mm very solid marine ply, we don't have the headroom to insulate above it but I spose glueing something to the underneath where possible can't hurt.

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We go to Sweden and Finland regulalry

One of the best bits of kit I found for pennies was the old Kenlowe Hot Start - the one I have on the 200 is an 88degree unit. It was a doddle to fit and and works very well at keeping the block warm...

I also used aluminim coated bubble wrap as a sandwich in the head lining and other places

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