Has anyone fitted a heater to their BEC? I have and it isn't very good. I have teed into the pipe that goes out of the head of my R1 engine into the end of the thermostat and fet that through a valve into the heater and the return pipe tees in between the radiator outlet and the water pump.

I went out on quite a blast today and the air was only warm and you could only feel it if your hand was in front of the air pipes which feed into the footwells.

The pipes to and from the heater get quite warm and there is reasonable water flow when the engine is running above idle. What else can I do?

buy some gloves?

maybe have a valve to close the main radiator completely when its cold? there must be a way of making it work well. I suspect that the difference in bore size between the main rad and the heater causes too little water to flow through your heater - it needs to be both hot and fast, as it will cool fast in a flow of cold air.

i would mount it in in the short circuit...

between the pump and the head...

at least the temp then i limited...

dunno wy it should heat up its strange..
maybe it is bad from the inner side and doesn't conduct the temp very well....

i thought bike engines would heat up very well and quickly compared to cars..

Tks

I feel this is to do with capacity/flow. If you look at the size of a car rad, and that of a bike rad, there is a fair difference. On my old Reveres, the rad/hoses/fan/fan switch were tiny in comparison to even a small car set-up. Proportionately, for a heater matrix to work, it has to be smaller that the rad for the vehicle. So the heater unit would end up quite small, and therefore due to the resultant airflow over the matrix not much warm air would be created.
My 2 pennorth.
Pete

but if you stick your internal small rad, in the boot circuit... then it will always become at least 80degrees...

and in fact you don't need 80 degrees hot air.. when its cold you just need 20degrees that will undo any poo on the window....(ice)..

anyway becos of the fact that we have an cabruio model i don't expect the defrosting will be like on the normal cars..

all the heat will go upwards....

Tks

you big jessy!!!!

I think the flow argument is probably close to the problem. You could always put an electric booster pump in circuit to increase the flow rate - bit of an expensive way to warm your feet though