We had electric heater dipsticks for the auxiliary
light-plants on my
drilling rigs. Kept the oil, crankcase and block heated to about 55-60F
even in sub-zero weather.
We had a 200-ton 'boat' that had 4 large MTU engines in it
and during the winter we had to take turns going around and checking
the block temp. hourly, sometimes starting them nearly as often.
There were some nights where the block heaters just couldn't keep the
temps up enough so we'd have to run them for 10-15 minutes at a pop
to bring the temp back up. It was a SES so two of the engines were
for lift-fans while the larger two were the main's hooked to
waterjets.
A cool thing about this boat was that it had a GPS system
hooked to a Mac of some sort housed in a custom cabinet with a 21"
monitor. The GPS data would be overlaid on graphics of the area the
boat was in and you could zoom in or out as much as you wanted for
whatever level of detail you needed. It came in pretty handy during
a run along the coast from Maryland to Florida and back. This was
back in '93 so the Mac was still a 68k variety.
Jeff
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Home of the TRS-80 Model 2000 FAQ File
http://www.cchaven.com
http://www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/lakes/6757