These days, touchscreen navigation systems, surround sound, and keyless ignition are replacing certain outdated features. However, there’s one feature that will never go out of style: heating. Car heaters have been around for generations, but exactly how do they work?

Car heaters are clever and practical devices, in that they are effectively secondary cooling systems for your car engine. Because of this, they work in much the same way as the main cooling system. The heater core that sits in your car's dashboard is a miniature radiator, drawing hot coolant from the engine's cylinder head and radiating excess heat through the radiator fins before returning the coolant to the pump. This circulation of coolant can also help keep your engine temperature down.

The heater fan simply blows air through the heater core and into the cabin of the car, the air heated by its passage through the radiator filled with hot coolant. From the dashboard, the driver can control the amount of air blowing through the heater core. This is what produces a warm and toasty car interior!

It's a simple but ingenious solution for which all winter drivers are very grateful. There would be little point incorporating an extra heating element into a car's design when the engine is putting out so much heat, and a heater running from the battery would drain the car's power very quickly if a driver was not careful.

In very cold conditions, you can also use a diesel block heater in order to make sure that the liquid components of your car (fuel, oil, coolant) don't freeze overnight. Some drivers will leave a heater on all night, but it's generally recommended that a warm-up period of four hours is more than enough to ensure efficient running of your car by the time you get in to drive to work the next morning. These block heaters run off standard domestic power.

Because car heaters are tied so closely to the operation of a car's engine, it's strongly advised that you don't try and fix any problems yourself. Instead, give the nothing yet service department a call and ask us to take a look. Unlike portable sound systems or GPS devices, your car heater is plugged in directly to your car's mechanical systems and should not be meddled with lightly.