Have her carry a metal pail of charcoal to work with her. A few hours before she goes out to start the car to go home, she can go out, light the charcoal on fire, place the pail under the oil pan, and go back inside

On a serious note, I don't know of many parking decks or garages that would tolerate running a gasoline generator inside there for very long without calling the police or the superintendent or the manager or whoever was in authority to come shut it off due to "fire hazard" or some other such excuse... I know they'd never let me do that at school. A series set of 8 batteries also seems prohibitively expensive... honestly, the best thing I've heard so far was the battery running an inverter. Some various methods of wiring it in have also been mentioned, but just so there's no chance of the other battery draining your car's main source, that seems like the cheapest fastest get-it-working solution.

I also don't know of many standard lead-acid type car batteries that would withstand a lot of that daily discharge-and-recharge cycle before starting to suffer from it. Normally deep-draining these things is hard on them.

Alternately... just parallel-connect the second battery to the car's charging system. Run it like some of the John Deeres do... two 12v batteries supplying twice the current to the starter. That way, she can just crank up with glowplugs and the starter will have roughly twice as much (minus the loss in efficiency getting current from the alternate battery location to the starter) to work with. Good glowplugs and this upgraded battery setup should be enough to get her going in all but the most awful of climates even without the electric heater.

__________________


~Michael S.~
Past cars:

1986 300SDL
1987 300SDL
1982 240D
1982 300SD


Current:

1987 300SDL