Installing a DEFA Warmup II Kit and Engine heater

Background
My wife and I are in the process of emigrating from the Netherlands to Swedish Lappland, and as the winters can get a bit frosty out here (coldest we've seen so far is -32 but it can get colder) we figured our fabia could use a little help with cold starts. Apparently Volvo's (being swedish) come with a built-in engine heater by default as a volvo-owning friend of mine helpfully pointed out. This is all well and good, but we like our fabia and even if it had been an option when the original owners purchased it- it's not on our Dutch Fabia.

(Engine) heating systems and selecting the right one

The main 2 manufacturers that I've come across are Calix and Defa. Generally speaking both should be fine, but Defa offered a few options that went a bit beyond the basic features so I settled for DEFA.

There are multiple types of engine heaters (link 1, link 2). Some of these are model specific, others less so.

The inline circulating look quite nice, but given that I only had the car up on 2 small ramps in a cold frosty garage, with no professional means of capturing the coolant liquid I didn't want to drain it all - particularly since it had just been replaced with the right frost-proof mixture this fall.

Luckily DEFA offers a variety of different types of engine heaters, and within each type they offer some variants that may be model specific. For my Mk 3 Fabia Combi 1.2 TSI, I needed the model 420810 engine heater, but you can find the right model for your skoda here.

That gets you your engine heater, but your cabin is still cold - mine would be anyway as we don't have heated seats (yet) nor a heated steering wheel (yet?). I'll fully admit that this is a bit of a first-world-problem, but having a cabin heater really would be quite nice as well.

At this point you need to start considering your demands/requirements. The simplest kits will simply use a Y-splitter with 1 lead going from the plug/socket to the engine heater, and the other to the cabin heater. As far as I can tell all cabin heaters (both Calix and DEFA) tend to have their own power switch on the unit, more powerful units may have a multi-mode switch between 'off'/'medium'/'high'.

More advanced kits include an extra lead to a battery charger, as well as controllers that may be remote controlled with a dedicated remote, bluetooth, or even via GPS.

Taking into account that really cold weather isn't all that great for batteries either, depending on your budget a kit with an included charger might be worth it.

I ended up choosing the WarmUp II 1900 Bluetooth kit, combined with the engine heater mentioned above.

My requirements

• Compatible engine heater, this requirement doesn't really count because both DEFA and Calix will sell you the engine heater separately from the rest of the kit.
• Adequate Cabin heater
• Battery Charger
• Remotely controllable
• No subscriptions
  • The GPS enabled version requires a subscription because it uses GPRS (mobile phone network) to communicate data, presumably to the app on your phone through DEFA servers.

My considerations.

Cabin heater: Given the extra volume of the combi/estate I figured that a 1200 W or 1400 W might be adequate, but I'd ratter err on the side of caution and look for something in the 1700 to 1900 W range. I don't recall where, but I read somewhere that the 1900 W  (and up) heaters are aimed more at large cars/suvs and vans.

Battery charger: No detailed requirements here, just a drip charger that will maintain a decent charge given the low temperatures.

Remotely controllable: The most basic kits will just turn on when you plug them in, pretty much like you want them to. But I don't want to have to go out and do that every time.

I've actually only just now noticed that Calix also sells a bluetooth control unit, but they call it 'Timer' 😑. In any case they sell it separately from the rest of the kit. As I wasn't aware of this I had ruled them out. Looking at their website it looks pretty decent. In term of control it might even provide a bit more than the DEFA app. Price wise I think the Calix option may be a bit cheaper, though the available kits don't quite neatly match up in terms of capacity, for easy price comparisons.

A separate remote (DEFA Smart start kit) would likely have been fine, but I know I would likely have misplaced the remote control half the time. Given that I tend to always have my phone with me (if I haven't misplaced it 😉😅), a bluetooth controller with an app seemed much more practical. Also easier because now my wife and I both have the app on our phones, and linked to our hub. Should we have guessed that might borrow our car or something, we can just tell them to install the app and pass them the instructions for pairing.

No subscription: I somewhat understand the need for a subscription in the GPS package, because an embedded mobile connection is needed for sending data. However I'm not sure I like that it's not up to me as the customer to arrange this subscription with an e-sim or a physical insertable sim, with the mediation of DEFA. Although I get why it's needed in some form in this particular case I'm also on the whole not a big fan of subscriptions for everything. I also don't think the pricing is particularly unreasonable or egregious, it's just also not particularly great - especially given the inherently limited amount of data being transmitted.

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Installation

Considering the time I'm parking this post for now, will update it later this weekend to include the pictures and explanatoin of the install process for my skoda.

For now I'll leave you with the youtube vids that I used to evaluate whether I was going to do the install myself or not.

MONTERA MOTORVÄRMARE & KUPEVÄRMARE ( GÖR DET SJÄLV ) (swedish vid of installation on a ...vw passat?/golf?)

Defa Cabin Heater Install DIY (2009 Saab 9-5) - Trionic Seven

Interior heater install for Skoda Citigo iV electric

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