"A society prospers when men plant trees whose shadows they will never rest in." - Ancient Proverb
In 2016, shortly after purchasing the Subaru, I went poking around the engine compartment, looking for the engine block heater. In retrospect, I'm a little surprised that I never took pictures or made a post about that. I did a bit of research at the time to learn where the engine heater is located.
I learned that it was located underneath cylinder #2. So I jacked the car up and found the heater, but the electrical cord was missing, and I wasn't sure of the heating element condition.
Side note: Google search has turned into such utter garbage that most of my "Subaru Block Heater Location" results were from other manufacturers - Ford, Kia, Dodge, etc. I got this image from Yandex. I am switching to Yandex as a search engine, because I'm sick of getting search results that have nothing to do with the information that I'm after. Bing is no better either, and Duck Duck go uses Bing.
I ordered a replacement (with power cord) from Amazon for $25 - they've since doubled and tripled in price.
After the replacement arrived, I lifted the car again, drained the coolant, installed the brand new engine heater, and then refilled the engine with the old coolant. I bench tested the old heater and burned my finger badly, so yeah that old one is still in my parts bin. LOL.
The power cord I just zip tied to whatever wasn't hot or didn't need to move until it got to the radiator grille, and it worked like a champ! Confession: I didn't really need the engine block heater, because the Subie was (note the past tense) parked in a heated garage every night. Nevertheless, I still plugged it in during very cold snaps, because it's nice to have warm air blowing on you by the time you reach the end of the driveway when its dangerously cold.
Since the S600 arrived though, the poor Subaru got kicked outside, and it's baseline isn't the 45-50 degrees F (7-10C) that the garage heater is set to. Now the entire car can get down below zero F (-17C), where the doors don't want to close and the controls are sticky due to the grease thickening up. So the engine heater is in use all winter, if only to speed up the process of warming the interior before I arrive at work.
However, I'm cheap. I don't like having the engine heater using power all night long - wasting power and money - when I only need the engine heated shortly before I use the car. So I bought one of these: A heavy-duty timer that can take a three-prong plug.
I set it to turn on at about 2 AM and shut off at about 5:30 AM. I was usually out the door at about 5, so unplugging it to use the car is what shut off the engine heater. The other numbers that are pushed in are when I grabbed it.
To the point finally. The old mechanical timer finally got replaced with modern technology.
This timer also has a three prong outlet and can deal with switching 15 amps of current. It has a decent digital display and a LED light to let you know that it's putting electricity to your engine heater. Best of all though, the clock has a battery back-up, so if you lose power, this thing will keep time for months on end, and still retain the program you set.
The directions for programming the timer weren't as descriptive as I would have liked - Chinese translation, of course - but eventually I figured out what they were trying to communicate, and now the timer works as it needs to. No complaints, this thing rocks. And it wasn't very expensive.
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