Eliminating my Heater

[James A]

I am going to remove the heater in my car as I have never used it. In the place of the heater I am going to fab a cold air intake that will shield the intake from the engine heat and use the bonnet louvers that previously were the heater air input. I know what I want to do except for one hose from the thermostat housing. My car has a 1998 Zetec engine with the Contour thermostat housing. My question is this; on the housing there is a hose out of the bottom of the housing that goes to the "submarine". If I eliminate the heater is this hose necessary or can this hose be plugged?

Below is a cut and paste from an old thread that shows my system, I am talking about the hose shown on the diagram as Thermostat Bottom that goes back to the submarine.

[MHKflyer52]

I would think the hose you’re talking about is actually a bypass that lets a certain amount of coolant go by the thermostat and helps the flow of coolant when the heater is turned off.

I would leave it and just add a loop to the heater lines to insure that the coolant flows thru the lines so no sludge forms in the blocked lines that were connected to the heater.

[scannon]

I think that if the heater connections on the engine and submarine are just nipples, I would cap them. Otherwise you are circulating the hottest water from the t-stat housing directly into the coolest water as it flows from the radiator outlet through the submarine without any cooling of that flow. That will raise the temperature of the cool side flow before it reaches the engine. You already have the T-stat bypass hose doing that, why diminish the efficiency of the system any further especially since it is likely that the heater bypass hose will be larger than the t-stat bypass hose?

 

An alternative would be to use those heater connections with something like a frame rail cooler or an oil cooler type heat exchanger to gain a little extra cooling for the overall system.

[James A]

thank you for the answers, I think I will cap the actual heater lines and leave the lower thermostat housing to submarine hose as I to think it may be a minimum flow line that is not necessarily part of the heater system.