Nitrous bottle heater

Davsurfa

Torque Junkie
Points
62
Location
Daventry Northants
Car
Hyundai Coupe 2.0l
Living in the UK we don't get to enjoy the warmer climates and this causes havoc with my bottle pressure. The solution being a bottle heater but the best price I can find is £140!! Although this may not be a huge amount of money I can think of better things to be spending it on and would only pay it if I have no other choice(as I figure I REALLY do need a heater) and I prefer making stuff that works rather than just buying bolt on goodies. So I've had an idea or three about how to keep the bottle warmer and wanted your input as to whether or my ideas are good to use, bad or outright dangerous.

So first idea is to move the bottle from the boot in to the middle of the rear seats using the cabin heat to warm the bottle. Even though this would mean cutting my rear seat up I reckon it would be the easiest to do. As far as the legal side of it goes over here there is no law stating where the bottle can or can't be mounted, just that it needs to be secure.

Second idea is to extend the heater ducting from underneath the front seats straight through to the boot and then controlling the heater via the heater control on the dash. It'd only heat the boot space when directed to the footwells.

Third idea is to tap in to the engine coolant and run an extra hose from the original system through the car, spiral it around the bottle then back down to another part of the original system creating a loop. Although this would be a fair days work it would be regulated to an extent by the thermostat so the coolant in the hose shouldn't get much above 90 to 95 degrees as the 'stat opens at 88. The other bonus is that with more fluid in the system it should also create extra cooling. If I was to use this system I'd place a valve in the system so that I could turn it off in summer if the ambient temp is warm enough.


All help, replies and responses greatly appreciated :)
 
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Just get a bottle heater from WON. Don't be tight. They come with a pressure switch that automatically switches the heater off when the bottle reaches optimum pressure (950psi I think). Nice bit of kit and easily worth the money.

You're considering cutting bits of your car up to save £140? Gotta love complicated solutions to simple problems.
 
Bottle blankets get up to between 85 and 95 degrees which is the roughly the running temp of the coolant.

As for buying stuff off WON, I'd never touch any of their kit. I've seen their kit and to be quite honest it looked like it came from Argos.
 
What do you have? A £250 NOS setup? I've seen them and they are awful, cheap isn't even the word.

It's fine. What do you expect them to do, gold plate it? If paupers won't pay £140 for one, who's going to pay £400?
 
What do you have? A £250 NOS setup? I've seen them and they are awful, cheap isn't even the word.

It's fine. What do you expect them to do, gold plate it? If paupers won't pay £140 for one, who's going to pay £400?


My kit cost £560. It would appear I've chipped your nail varnish by disliking WON. But then to be honest from what I've read from your posts clearly you are incapable of making anything and are of the impression the best way to do anything is throw £££ at it. You strike me more as the type of person who would take a car to garage, then bodyshop, then tell the world just how good it is. I would rather fab stuff myself and do the work myself.
 
My kit cost £560. It would appear I've chipped your nail varnish by disliking WON. But then to be honest from what I've read from your posts clearly you are incapable of making anything and are of the impression the best way to do anything is throw £££ at it. You strike me more as the type of person who would take a car to garage, then bodyshop, then tell the world just how good it is. I would rather fab stuff myself and do the work myself.

Then you're either ignorant or have a massive inability to read. Couldn't be farther from the truth. Paying money for good products and throwing £££ at something are two entirely different things ;)

Then again, from what I've read of your posts you're not exactly the sharpest tool in the box, so maybe that notion if difficult to grasp?
 
Whoa!, there, chaps.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, and that is governed by their experiences. This doesn't need to get into a slanging match. As my old granny used to say - If you don't have anything nice to say, say nothing.

Please keep discussions civilised. We don't tolerate flaming on this site. If you want to flame, join Pistonheads.

Some people swear by Fords and others won't touch them with a barge pole, but this doesn't make them good or bad cars.

I have seen good and bad reviews on both systems. The real problem with both of them is in the fitting and maintenance. Both will work fine if installed correctly but will kill your engine if not.

Both have strengths and weaknesses - let's discuss these rather than 'your system is rubbish and mine is great'. Explain why you consider that your system is better than mine. Let's see your evidence so we can all join in the discussion and perhaps learn something.
 
If fitting a method of heating a nitrous bottle, you will also require a means of monitoring the gas pressure and regulating the heating in order to keep pressure at its optimum level.

You should also consider a bottle blanket, both to help keepthe bottle warm AND to keep it from getting too hot on the occasional days in this country when the sun is out :)
 
thing i was thinking how much do you use it
surely this time of the year you are not on the track much to use it

but if it was me i would of had it inside anyway if you have it no point hiding it
you dont need passagers lol
 
I like your thinking Dave, but when it comes to handling compressed gases I'd err on the side of caution & stick with the official approved products.
Also from an insurance point of view if you told them you have a home made bottle warmer as one of your mods they may well run for the hills. ;)
 
but if it was me i would of had it inside anyway if you have it no point hiding it
you dont need passagers lol

Ah, this is a good example of divergent opinions :) I am hiding all of my performance mods:

All CF will be painted to match the rest of the car.

If we find that Nitrous is required at a later date, the purge jet will point at the intercooler, making use of the gas rather than wasting it just for show.

No shopping list on the wing boasting about what is in the car, the time slip will be sufficient for that :)

Passengers are fun, especially when they scream :)
 
What is it like to actually have NOS in your car? :embarrest:

I do not know anyone who has a kit, and my only sighting of a NOS kit was at the Peterborough Modified Nationals this year! ;)

Is the performance you get anything like it is in the movies, flip a lever and press a button then this sudden massive surge of power launches your car forward at an ever frightening pace? :amazed:
 
What is it like to actually have NOS in your car? :embarrest:

I do not know anyone who has a kit, and my only sighting of a NOS kit was at the Peterborough Modified Nationals this year! ;)

Is the performance you get anything like it is in the movies, flip a lever and press a button then this sudden massive surge of power launches your car forward at an ever frightening pace? :amazed:

A top quality installation can feel quite like this. Yet NOS isn't the first thing to consider.
 
Ah, this is a good example of divergent opinions :) I am hiding all of my performance mods:

All CF will be painted to match the rest of the car.

If we find that Nitrous is required at a later date, the purge jet will point at the intercooler, making use of the gas rather than wasting it just for show.

No shopping list on the wing boasting about what is in the car, the time slip will be sufficient for that :)

Passengers are fun, especially when they scream :)
much the same, my bottle is hidden in the spare wheel well, and my badge on the back of the car says TDi
2010-10-29144738.jpg
 
Is the performance you get anything like it is in the movies, flip a lever and press a button then this sudden massive surge of power launches your car forward at an ever frightening pace? :amazed:
A street system for an otherwise unmodified car might add, say, 50bhp to a 2 litre engine. That could be wired to a push switch but more often a throttle microswitch or throttle position sensor would be used to activate the system, once armed. That sort of boost would just give a nice transition that would make 4th gear accelerate like third, and third accelerate like second. Nothing wild, but still a big grin factor. Think of 'kickdown' but without the gear changing.


Interesting to find this thread - I have an interest in nitrous and I'm a firm fan of WoN gear (and sell their gear), all too often there are myths and wives' tales to dispell about nitrous.

The OP's idea for heating a bottle is interesting but it really would need some sort of pressure control or monitor - which is the most important part of a bottle heater kit. Forgetting the risk of physical overpressure and burst disks, long before pressure gets that high it would cause lean running. Bad bad bad!
 
A street system for an otherwise unmodified car might add, say, 50bhp to a 2 litre engine. That could be wired to a push switch but more often a throttle microswitch or throttle position sensor would be used to activate the system, once armed. That sort of boost would just give a nice transition that would make 4th gear accelerate like third, and third accelerate like second. Nothing wild, but still a big grin factor. Think of 'kickdown' but without the gear changing.


Interesting to find this thread - I have an interest in nitrous and I'm a firm fan of WoN gear (and sell their gear), all too often there are myths and wives' tales to dispell about nitrous.

The OP's idea for heating a bottle is interesting but it really would need some sort of pressure control or monitor - which is the most important part of a bottle heater kit. Forgetting the risk of physical overpressure and burst disks, long before pressure gets that high it would cause lean running. Bad bad bad!

Cheers for this Conrod, I like the idea of Nitrous but i'm none to familiar with it's workings i'm afraid :)
 
Cheers for this Conrod, I like the idea of Nitrous but i'm none to familiar with it's workings i'm afraid :)
It's actually a lot more straightforward than you might think. We can get as much fuel into an engine as we want, the limit is how much oxygen we can get in, and that depends on how efficient the engine is as an air pump. Conventional tuning makes the engine pump more at high rpm, but less at low and midrange. Turbo and supercharging work a treat but are quite expensive.

Nitrous systems just plain cheat. Instead of pumping in more air, we add the extra oxygen and nitrogen in a cool liquid vapour, so the power limit is no longer what the engine can pump, but what the engine is strong enough to take. Properly designed and installed nitrous systems are very, very safe - WoN actuall guarantee against engine failure for up to 25% nitrous boost over standard output. My experience is that once people have tried nitrous, they never have a car again without it, because the systems trasfer easily and that grin factor isn't something you want to leave behind.
 
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I agree with what Conrod says, except for the cheat part :)

All tuning, as CR says, is about getting more charge into the combustion chamber, However, there is no right or wrong way to do this and no method is cheating, unless against the rules of the competition you are entering :)
 
Cheating in a nice way - by not working hard to pump in loads of air but taking a short cut with liquid vapour :D

In that case supercharging is cheating, because you are not working hard with head work, cams, exhaust manifolds, etc, etc. The only true non-cheating way is NA :)
 
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