Road heaters are hot air vents installed along side each tire specially designed to blow hot air on your tires. How many times have you found yourself "Spinning Your Wheels" at an intersection, and going nowhere because of a stupid ice patch? Or how about on a slight incline, or even stuck on a flat surface. All because of that annoying snow or ice patch you are stuck spinning? There Is No Escape! Until now. Introducing the brand spankin new Road Heaters. What are road heaters? Well it's simple actually, Road Heaters are hot air vents which blow on each tire and melt that blasted annoying snow and ice that is causing you all of your hardship. No more shovels! No more cat litter! Now you just flip a switch in your car, the Road Heaters kick on, and look at you kicking back relaxing as your road heaters melt you out of your problems. Wow, these suckers fight the cold. So get yourself equipped, and add the Road Heaters package to your next vehicle purchase. Now you can stay rest assured that you can get to where you're going with out having to break your back shoveling.-- IdeallyFourWord, Jun 12 2007 The Steamblower The_20SteamblowerIf a whole engine's worth of heat can't melt ice, hot air vents seem unlikely. [acurafan07, Jun 12 2007] Uh... I'll let someone else take this. However, now I understand why [lurch] didn't want me to delete "The Steamblower".-- acurafan07, Jun 12 2007 To be fair, this idea seems to be for melting the ice around the tires of a stationary vehicle. The required power levels are rather lower.-- 5th Earth, Jun 12 2007 This is assuming that the ice is no more than a few centimeters thick.
More than that and you are just bogging yourself down further.-- Galbinus_Caeli, Jun 12 2007 Just go away will you?-- zeno, Jun 12 2007 Okay, maybe not quite ice but what about snow? It's feasible that you are stuck in snow. Maybe the car's engine can't melt ice. But the car is powerful enough to warm up the human body when it's cold which is is already pretty much 98.6 degrees, so I'm sure theres got to be some high temp in those vents at least to melt something cold. You've got an alternate power source, the battery's not dead, the car is just stuck.-- IdeallyFourWord, Jun 12 2007 Snow. Under your tire.
It isn't really snow anymore - it's compressed into ice or near-ice (at least 90% of glacier density).
And your tire is sitting on top of it. You can blow the hot air on the tire, but not on the offending little snow patch. And the tire is full of air - nice little insulator there.
The good news: the tire is pretty good at conducting heat around the sidewalls and into the tread (normally it would go the other way to extract heat from the running surface). The bad: same thing. The heat gets conducted to the tire's entire surface, and gets busy escaping into the wintry air.
First, calculate the percentage of heat in your hot air that will transfer into the tire. Second, calculate the percentage of the tire's radiant heat that hits the slick spot. Calculate what it takes to melt the slick spot (remembering that you didn't pick it up off the road, which is going to suck up a lot of the heat that you pumped into the ice).
Put the results together to melt this fishbone out of the ice.-- lurch, Jun 13 2007 Ok, you can stay now that you have deleted the Yeahbabies.-- zeno, Jun 17 2007 Why thank you. Hmm.. how about small steamblowers mounted to the sides of the tires, would be even better if it surrounded the perimeter of the car. I'd imagine if you left them on for like 15 minutes it would at least help a little in getting out of say a foot of snow where you are just spinning tires or times wiping snow off the roof of your car and your shoes/boots get snow in them. I'm not one for calculations, but at least this doesn't run entirely on pixie dust. Although, I'm not ruling out the possibility that it will require an abracadabra and hocus pocus before each use.-- IdeallyFourWord, Jun 26 2007 random, halfbakery