Can This $12 Walmart Heater Heat My Car in Winter?

hi everyone i'm camped out at an oasis in the northern utah desert it's a beautiful place out here you'll be seeing more about this place in the video after this one but in this video i wanted to test and review a product that um that i've had for a couple of months that i bought with my own money i got it from walmart it's a little 12 electric heater when i bought it it was around 12 then i saw it like a month later for i think nine or ten dollars on sale so not an expensive little thing this is the heater in question i'm gonna test it out tonight it's gonna be around i think 22 degrees tonight that was the forecast for here so should be a good test for this little guy let's uh let's take a look at let's open it up and see what all the features are and everything here's a closer look at the box it is the sole personal electric ceramic heater i will put a link to this to walmart.com in the video description i looked on amazon and i couldn't find at least i don't think i could find this exact unit but there are several similar things for around twenty dollars so even though it's twice the price really not that much more money so as far as safety features go here there's a tip over safety switch so if you knock it over it'll turn off presumably so that it doesn't catch anything on fire there's an overheat safety fuse and it offers a cool touch exterior as far as controls and settings go there's one setting so you can't adjust the temperature or anything like that i think it's just a an on off switch and there's a power indicator light and it draws 250 watts so what does that mean exactly and how am i going to use this thing well 250 watts is uh is not nothing that's actually quite a bit of power this is not the kind of thing that you can run off of a little portable battery bank made to charge a phone for example you need a pretty serious portable battery bank to use this kind of thing anyway let me show you how i'm going to power this thing i'm going to be using the jackery explorer 1000 and this is a 1000 watt hour 1000 watt portable power station that 1000 there that is if you are any good at math that is four times the 250 watts required for the heater and so with this heater drawing 250 watts you could run it for four hours then it would use 1000 watts and that means it would deplete my portable battery bank completely i'm not interested in running down my battery bank i'm not interested in running this little heater for four hours my use case here is that maybe before bed you want to heat up your car a little bit you don't want to turn on your engine for whatever reason but you still want to you know make it a little bit easier to go to sleep maybe if you're cold if you're a cold sleeper you uh you want to warm up the inside of your car perfectly reasonable thing to do is this something you could use for that so i'm gonna see first of all exactly how much power it does draw it says 250 watts we'll see how it compares uh in reality and then i'm going to run it for i don't know 10 minutes see what the inside temperature is at the start and see what it is after 10 minutes see how much it heated up the car if it doesn't do anything in 10 minutes i might do it for 20 minutes or half an hour i don't know i guess we'll see i've never used this thing before i've never taken it out of the box let's open it up right at the stop start here we have a big old warning label i will read that later and if there's any relevant information i will relay that to you and inside we have just a i mean no surprise here it's a little heater and it looks like there's also an instruction manual and owner's guide which is a single piece of paper folded in half on off switch nothing fancy nice and small it's a good size good size for traveling and here we have our little uh little wall outlet there's still about half an hour of daylight left it's not very late and then it's going to be several more hours until i'm ready for bed and during that few hours the inside of the car the temperature will drop so hopefully by the time i go to sleep but by the time i'm ready to go to sleep it'll be nice and chilly inside and we can go ahead and test out the little heater so see you in a few hours all right everyone it is go time it is 8 13 p.m i'm in my rav4 for the night it is 24 degrees outside 50 degrees inside i have a little indoor outdoor thermometer that you cannot see right now in case you couldn't see it before there's the thermometer information i have an indoor outdoor thermometer and then here is where i have the heater so this is on top of my little my little cabinet in the back here these are my feet down here i'm in my sleeping bag partially in my sleeping bag this over here on the left is my cabinet where i have clothes and toiletries and everything like that to the left here just to get you more oriented this is the jackery 1 000 watt power station 1 000 watt hour portable power station and then the the the fridge is right there so basically what i learned from reading the manual is that this thing needs to be free from things that can catch fire anywhere around it instead of one foot on the sides which i have one feet of one foot of clearance on the sides i'm good there then one foot behind it i'm good there and three feet in front of it so i think this is a pretty good spot here for it let's go ahead and plug it in and get this thing going by the way i'm filming with a big panel light here so it's a little bit cumbersome so if i'm kind of moving things around if i'm struggling a little bit that's why oh and one other thing i wanted to show you on this this circle thing on the bottom that white circle that is the tip over switch so when you place it down that switch is engaged then if it's tipped over that switch is released and so that automatically turns it off i thought that was kind of neat the cord here is decently long it's maybe i don't know five or six feet so let's go ahead plug this in over here turn on the ac here that sound you heard i don't know if you heard it but that was the inverter kind of powering on now let's turn this sucker on and see what happens okay the light went on i'm feeling some air come out of it already it's not not hot yet of course i'm gonna set a timer for 10 minutes and i'll get back to you and we'll take a look at the temperature after that it's only been about a minute but the air is pretty darn warm coming out of that thing now let's take a look at the at the jacker you see what's happening over here it started off at 90. let's see if you can see this started off at 98 percent and it's drawing 268 264 266 watts somewhere in that range okay it's been 10 minutes nothing is on fire so far so good the jackery is at 94 percent the temperature is still 22 outside and it's 52 inside so the temperature went up two degrees so not a huge improvement two degrees in 10 minutes i'm going to let it run for another 10 minutes here and see how it goes 20 minute update still not on fire so that's good but it's really not making a difference here still 23 degrees outside still 52 inside now i'm sure it's it's warmer up here hot air rises obviously and so like if i if i feel the the ceiling here it i can definitely feel that it's a little bit warmer but i mean i'm down here i don't sleep on the ceiling i sleep down here and so it's not super useful in that sense i guess and i don't know if i said this but it's at 89 degrees here or 89 percent the jackery here started off at 98 i believe so it's gone down nine percent in 20 minutes gonna keep it running for another 10 minutes and uh we'll see if anything changes okay it's been half an hour it's been 30 minutes it's still working still blowing hot air we are at 24 degrees 20 nope 23 degrees outside 51 degrees inside so not an appreciable difference at all we're at 84 percent and remember we started at 98 so it's drawn down 14 in the last half hour still pulling 264-ish watts let's see if the automatic shut off here works so just to double check it is still pulling out hot air oh yeah it did that worked well that's good when that shut off this shut off too now it's pulling just 10 watts and that's for uh probably charging the battery that i'm charging down here and the inverter also shut off so it's not making sound anymore so what did we learn here well that thing isn't worth it it was only 12 dollars but i mean it doesn't feel any warmer in here according to the the thermometer it's not any warmer in here it's just not worth it it didn't make any real difference i'm sure if you ran it for like hours and hours and you might be able to feel it a little bit but again i mean that would just draw so much so much power from from your power station that uh it's definitely definitely not worth it you're better off either running the heater in the car just make sure the the tail pipe isn't blocked or anything like that much better doing that or getting a 12-volt heated blanket those are much more efficient and they do work or just do what i do and bring two or three sleeping bags i've slept into into single digit temperatures fahrenheit in my car here just with like three or four sleeping bags and i think that's the best way for most people just have more insulation on you and around you if you're camping in a vehicle like this don't even bother with a little ceramic heater like that i have to admit i'm a little bit surprised i thought it would work better than that i thought it would be at least a few more degrees and one interesting thing to note is that i have all the windows up right now so it's definitely going to be warmer in here than outside just from my body heat being in here for the last couple of hours if i were to roll the windows down which i do every night this thing would have even less impact i think i always have the windows down when i sleep just for ventilation to get uh to get fresh air in here and then also to help with with with condensation build up the better air circulation you have in here at night the the less of an issue you'll have with condensation inside your car and so even best case scenario with the windows rolled up the heater didn't do anything didn't do any good so don't bother save your money and hope you found this video helpful i i enjoyed doing this i liked this little experiment didn't turn out the way i i hoped it would but at least i now know and you guys do too and so let me know what you think let me know if you have any questions let me know if you've ever tried to use something like this in a in a small space in a small vehicle like this and or even in a bigger one i guess in an rv or van or whatever let me know what your experiences have been and i'll see you guys in the next video be sure to check out adventure know-how my new site where you can gain access to a map of all of my free campsites plus monthly bonus videos that you won't find anywhere else learn more at 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Channel: SUV RVing

Views: 380,958

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Id: eclAqPwQUg4

Length: 12min 54sec (774 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 13 2021