Edit: meant to put 3-4 minutes not 3/4
In: Engineering
As others have said, the heater in your car pulls free heat away from the engine. It works like this:
When you first start your car, the engine is cold. Inside your engine are pathways where engine coolant (water mixed with chemicals that are resistant to freezing) flow to keep your engine from getting too hot (overheating). The way it keeps your engine’s temperature down is by cycling the engine coolant from your engine through the radiator and blowing air (by using a fan as well as forced air as you travel down the road) over the fins of the radiator.
Actually, there is a device in your engine that delays this cycling of coolant in order to speed up the engine warming to normal operating temperature (about 165 – 180 F). This device is called a thermostat and it remains closed and blocks the flow of coolant into the engine until it reaches a certain temperature (or it would take even longer for the heat in your car to start working).
To heat the air in your car, it has something called a heater core which is mounted somewhere under/behind your car’s dash. This heater core is basically a smaller radiator. A fan in your car’s ventilation system blows air over this heater core and into the passenger cabin. Until hot coolant flows into this heater core, you will not have any warm air coming from your car’s vents.
As a side note, it’s easy to tell if your car’s thermostat has broken in the open position. Your engine will take a very long time to reach normal operating temperature and your vehicle’s heater will similarly take a very long time to start producing warm air.
Additional side note, the heater core on my 1968 Plymouth Valiant popped one morning on the way to work and instantly dumped hot coolant into the passenger floorboard of my car while simultaneously seriously fogging every window in my car. I had to stick my head out the window to make it safely to the side of the road.
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