Heating behaviour, strange or not

[MartinH]

I am planning my trip to get as far as possible on battery, of course no heating the cabbin to get longer.
We had about -5 ´C and i had to go app 50km, therefore i pressed "save" when i have lowered the battery to half, and was above 70km/h, the engine started and run with charging+ wheel drive.
After about 10 min i came into slower traffic, i shut the "save" of, engine stopped, then i started the heating of the cabin as the engine was warm, but then the engine started again to heat the cabbin?
So my question, does the coolar system from the engine heats the cabin? or is it just electrical, so the engine temperature does not affect if the engine starts or not when you want to heat cabbin.
Of course i should have heated the cabbin when the engine was running, but i think the behaviour is strange.

 

[Steepndeep]

Hi

I think anko or jaapv have commented on this before in some post. If I remeber correctly the coolant water from the ICE will definately heat the car. Case in point if I run my car on ICE from start, the electrical heater will turn off after about 5 minutes of running. Your situation is related to the fact that Mitsubishi engineers decided that if the temperature difference between actual cabin temp and requested cabin temp is too high (approx 10 C in Eco mode and 3 C in Normal mode I think), then the the ICE shall start. Period. Whether there is enough heat in the coolant already has nothing to do with this decision.

I bought a small in-car thermometer to check what the brain think is the cabin temperature so as not to cross the 10 degree span. This unfortunately works so-so as the cabin temp sensor is hidden quite far into the dashboard (by the looks of it) and gets slightly cooled by the airflow in the engine compartment. So the by the brain perceived cabin temp at highway speed is lower than actual cabin temp. Great :twisted:

 

[anko]

Coolant will be used to heat the cabin, through a thermostatic valve that opens when the coolant reaches 70 deg C. But, from my observations, this only happens when the ICE is running and the heater is on. So, even when the coolant is 85 deg C, with the engine off the heater may still draw electricity or the car may decide to start the engine.