Plug In Your Car
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Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton and this is The Weather Notebook. It gets pretty darned cold in Alaska right now. Keeping warm is an art form there and that applies not just to people but to cars. From Fairbanks, Alaska, Amy Mayer explains.

In Fairbanks, it's part of the daily ritual. Anyone without a heated garage has a place to plug in the car. Jay Cable parks his Toyota pick-up truck and stretches his extension cord from a plug poking out of the grill to an outlet next to his driveway. In the morning he'll unplug the car before heading to work.

Cable: "I pretty much keep it plugged in all the time. I have a timer that sets off about an hour before I leave in the morning and it also sets off a little before I leave in the afternoon in case it's a weekend and I want to go out.

And while he's at work Cable plugs into an outlet provided by his employer. v Mechanic, Eric Byrd winterizes cars at a local garage. The electric heaters, he explains, warms the battery, engine block, and oil pan. Looking under the hood of a Subaru in the lot he points to his choice for most essential car warming component.

The oil pan heater is really the one that keeps you from getting engine damage, because at 40 below zero the engine oil gets so thick that the engine can't pump it. It's like trying to pump clay, you can't move it. So your engine starts up and it takes your engine, it probably takes your engine about, I did it once with my own vehicle in an emergency and at 45 below zero it took two minutes before the oil light went off and it got oil pressure. So it ran for 2 minutes with no oil, which is what you're doing on a cold morning. And if you start it up like that all winter long, your engine won't last very long.

Amy stays plugged into us from Fairbanks, Alaska.