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It was cold, but not that cold!

Posted: February 23rd, 2020, 7:20 pm
by km1125
This winter I dropped a USB temp probe on my engine to see what the temps would be like over the winter. It sampled temp a little over an hour for each one and I recorded it from last October till today. This is with the boat sitting outside with shinkwrap and the monitor was just placed on the intake manifold.

Here's what it looks like:

winter_engine_temp_measurements.jpg

Re: It was cold, but not that cold!

Posted: February 24th, 2020, 1:53 am
by RGrew176
Interesting data.

Re: It was cold, but not that cold!

Posted: February 24th, 2020, 6:28 am
by Benda515
Thats a great idea

Re: It was cold, but not that cold!

Posted: February 24th, 2020, 6:45 am
by Viper
It's definitely been a warmer winter up here too for sure, so far, fingers crossed it stays that way.

Re: It was cold, but not that cold!

Posted: February 24th, 2020, 12:01 pm
by Cooler
Really interesting! Where are you located? I was surprised to see such a wide variation. 20F around 12-10, and then almost 50F around 12-22? Wow! Shows the dramatic effect of solar energy under the shrink wrap. Excellent post!!! 8-) er

Re: It was cold, but not that cold!

Posted: February 24th, 2020, 6:55 pm
by tomschauer
Not sure of the average temps this year, but our marina has seen zero ice so far.

Re: It was cold, but not that cold!

Posted: February 25th, 2020, 7:29 pm
by km1125
Cooler wrote:Source of the post Really interesting! Where are you located? I was surprised to see such a wide variation. 20F around 12-10, and then almost 50F around 12-22? Wow! Shows the dramatic effect of solar energy under the shrink wrap. Excellent post!!! 8-) er

This is in SE Michigan.

I was trying to track down a site where I could get the daily high and low temperatures for that same period to overlay it to see what it looked like. The USGS has it, but I haven't figured out how to download it in tabular format yet.

I'm guessing that the engine block would stabilize the temperature quite a bit. If it would have just hung the sensor in the air it might have shown more of a high and low swing each day. Once I set up one of these probes on a nightstand and couldn't figure out what the spikes and dips were. I was getting a dip in the late evenings and a big spike every morning.

Turned out that coincided nicely to when I put a cup of ice water (A, C) or a cup of hot coffee (B, D) on the other end of the nightstand!! Mystery solved!
room_temps.jpg

Re: It was cold, but not that cold!

Posted: February 27th, 2020, 12:14 pm
by Tireless
Thanks for the data. This is something I have always wondered. :down: