ok, so first cold weather with the '13 MCS N18, and if i am just tooling around town the heat is down right, well, not hot air, if i keep my RPM's above 2500 (maybe 3rd gear instead of 4th) the air is warmer.
is it common for the mini to produce a lack of hot air with the heater if the RPM's are left low while driving, or is it just the super cold here in Iowa and the car just not able to get hot enough to produce warm air?
i suppose i could do the old trick we used to do back in the day and stick cardboard in front of the radiator to block the cold air from chilling the radiator too fast, but i am not that Ghetto yet.

 

No experience with my Mini (JCW) in real cold weather but I know with other cars it can take some time before the engine is really warm. (In the "cold" weather, cold as near freezing, in which I have experience with the Mini the heater produces heat pretty quick after engine start. I don't drive the car hard but RPMs are around 2K to 3K. The car is equipped with a manual.)

In your car's case, that the heater air -- which is of course heated by coolant which in turn gets its heat from the engine -- is warmer if you keep the RPMs above 2500 this sort of parallels my experience with my other car in which I can monitor coolant and oil temperatures.

And you do mention the temperature is super cold. I've had another car (a Porsche 996 Turbo) in 0F ambient temperature, and with the car parked out in the open in a hotel parking lot overnight, and it takes longer to get the engine warm and the heater producing a good blast of hot air under these "super cold" conditions.

So it reads like what you are experiencing could be normal. Do you use a climate control setting (like auto mode) that has the radiator fan running all the time? If so this can increase the amount of time it takes for the engine to warm up. With my JCW I use auto mode but turn off the A/C compressor. 'course I suspect in the temperatures in which you are driving the A/C compressor is probably disabled. This is done to avoid the evaporator from freezing the water that collects on it. If this happens this can block air flow through the evaporator and cause the heater air output to be diminished.

I would be reluctant to use any cardboard to reduce air flow through the radiator and thus force the engine to run hotter. However, I have lived/driven in the midwest enough to have seen this and know it is rather common.

 

 

Cold here in Michigan too. Heated seats keep my butt warm...the rest not so much. It does seem to take a while to heat up and never a real heat wave.

 

I second this; in real cold temps, the Mini struggles more than any of the cars that I owned to warm up the cabin. My beemer can get to 80 inside in 5 min of driving no problem, no matter what is outside.

 

+1 and if you have a little leak you really have to rev the engine to get heat in the heater core. Thats how you know if you have a thermostat leak. Be safe guys its super cold. My old R52 warms up but the R56 and R58 are little slow. Once warm the heater core is warm. But what I have seen with the R56 has a little leak the heater core gets super cold.

 

The car is not affected by wind chill. That is a metric that only applies to humans (and I guess other animals).

But 0F or lower is very cold. You get no argument from me.

I was in Missouri in late Dec. 2014/early Jan. 2015 for almost 4 weeks and at times it got down to 0F to 1F and stayed there for a day or more. It was very cold. My 996 Turbo engine was unfazed but oh did it take a lot of driving to get the engine even near warm. Might add the exposure to the cold weather cost me 3 radiators. All 3 developed leaks. The SA at the Springfield MO Porsche dealer told me it was not unknown for the radiators to fail at around the 125K mile mark. My car which was a CA car and never really experienced that cold of temperature before, at least not for that long, had 130K miles on it. The radiators were "taken out" by the extreme temperature differences, starting out from 0F and after a while approaching 200F then after the engine was shut off and the wind howling about -- sometimes with blowing snow -- dropping from near 200F to close to ambient in just a few hours.

As for the cabin, the Turbo had an auto climate control system in which if set to auto will not initially blast cold air out the vents. The amount of air blown out is increased as the coolant temperature rises so as one drives the car and as the engine gets warmer the cabin warms up with no arctic blast of air in the meantime. This tends to mitigate a slow to warm up engine. (Both the auto climate control in the Boxster and the Turbo really spoiled me regarding A/C and heater systems. The Mini JCW A/C and heater system comes close though to matching the Porsche systems.)

Anyhow, I drove my JCW yesterday and it was not cold -- 50F -- but the auto climate control system was putting out hot air in just a few blocks of driving at 25 to 35mph. Yeah, I know 50F is a long ways above 0F. Maybe one of these days I'll have the time to take the JCW up to say Lake Tahoe or Flagstaff where it can experience some really cold weather and then find out how well it handles it.

 

Have you checked the cabin airfilter? Our daughter's Xterra and wife's Accord had the same same problem and a new cabin air filter fix it FWIW.

 

'11 MCS here in Philadelphia and 9-13 degree weather. Cold weather exposed a small leak from the t-stat housing so I replaced the housing, flushed the coolant and bled the system. Things are much better now. The auto setting "trick" works well. Within about 5 mins of cold start I am getting consistent hot air.

So I would check your coolant level first, check for any airlocks, and then for any leaks.

 

i have not checked the cabin filter, but the air flow doesnt change or hasnt changed from what it was, a filter isnt going to block warm or cold air, it will simply block the volume of air.
now if said filter is behind the heater core then the volume of air through it isnt much and would technically be warmer because the slow air getting more "time" through the core. though the same would hold true that slower air would cool faster before it came out the vents.
i really think it simply is the fact that we were sitting in the negative teens to negative 20's air temp for several days.
before that the heater wasn't an issue in fact it was so warm my feet were on fire i had to turn the temp down.
so could be a few things i guess.
no problem here though checking the cabin filter.
its in the 40's this weekend so thats my goal.

im just a low rpm guy around town until i need it, which since buying this car is more often then it used to be so seeing that 2500+ rpm range increase heat i understand the physics and am ok with that.