I have a new Hcalory suitcase diesel heater used for my tent but could be applied as engine preheat as well. Pros are dry heat, thermostat controlled by phone, super efficient, everything packs inside of case except for fuel tank as its screwed to side of suitcase with its fuel line slightly exposed. Cons include separate 12V battery required and different kind of fuel required. I don't use this heat for engine preheat as I have E-Z heat pad under my oil pan.

Overall, I'm really happy with this unit.

48Stinson1083 wrote: Cons include separate 12V battery required and different kind of fuel required.

I have a similar unit and, so far, it works great for preheating. It will run just fine off Jet A, diesel, kerosene, etc.

Chris

gahi wrote:Consensus in most groups is to stay away from the Vevor ones. Mostly due to the controllers not being tunable.

3 of the heaters I have are not "tunable", 2 of them are. I have felt ZERO need to mess with any of the factory settings. If you follow any of the CHD (Chinese Diesel Heater) groups on FB you will see a ton of posts of guys mucking with the settings then trying to figure out why they wont work. Its kinda like a snowmobile that guys put boondockers on that have no idea on how to really tune a sled. They just dick with it till it burns down then blames the sled..

I have 3 vevor heaters, 1 came with the "better" 6 blade controller and the others the 3 blade so its a crap shoot. Worst case you can get a new mother board and controller for 30 bucks and tune it till she wont run anymore.

The other issues guys have is running a power supply instead of a battery. They draw around 10 amps during start up and shut down when the glow plug is running and around 2 amps on high after about 3 or 4 minutes when the case temp comes up and the glow plug shuts off. Most cheap power supplies will just piss you off as you will get nothing but start up errors. The other issue is shutting them down. If you are running off 110 converters and you loose power during the run, you can bet you will melt the mother board from the heat off the case. if you have a 12V battery (even a small motorcycle battery on with a charger/maintainer hooked up) when you hit a low voltage it will shut itself down and go through the cooling cycle. YOU HAVE to let it run through the cooling cycle and shut itself off or you will cook the mother board.

Issues you read about are guys putting these in a van and then having too much heat so they only run them on the lowest setting and never get the burn chamber up to full temp and they will soot up pretty quickly and you have to pull them apart to do a decarbon (20-30 minute job). Using them to preheat the airplane, it only needs to run on high and in the 4 or 5 years I have been using mine, I have never had to decarbon nor have ever had a failure of any sort.

I use these in my 26' enclose trailer, plane preheater, boat cabin heater, tent heater (at 10 degrees running it on low I can keep the arctic oven at 70 degrees inside), motorhome and also stuck one in the back of the ranger and ran a scat tube into the cab for nice toasty rides at -25.

All this being said, they are cheap, efficient heaters, but are NOT miracle workers. You are not going to heat an uninsulated 3 car garage with one (one in each corner might do it).