This Underused Feature Can Get Your Car Warmer Faster In The Winter

Sliding into a freezing car in the heart of winter is not a great feeling. Even if you're lucky enough to have a garage, the interior will still be chilly (unless you also heat the garage). It's bad enough having to slog through ice and snow-covered roads to get to work; dropping one's derrière onto a slab of ice and grabbing a frosty steering wheel just adds insult to injury.

Warming a car up before heading out is an age-old tradition that many folks growing up in the age of carbureted engines (before fuel injection eliminated the need to warm up a car) find hard to break. Today, many states have "puffing" laws that prohibit leaving your car unattended while it warms up. They're meant to keep ne'er-do-wells from seeing exhaust plumes (the "puffing") and subsequently stealing your prized possession. According to the Department of Energy, idling cars not only waste 6 billion gallons of gas but also spew 58 million tons of CO2 into the air. Given that, there is a perfect amount of time to let your car warm up, and it's much less than you realize.

Unfortunately, that leaves less time for the inside to reach a Goldilocks "just right" level of coziness. Thankfully, there's a feature in your car that you're probably not using to its fullest potential. Heck, you may not even understand what that button with an image of a car with a semi-circular swoosh arrow inside of it does. But when engaged, it significantly improves your vehicle's heating performance.

Pushing the recirculation button warms the air faster through a simple process that stops the HVAC system from pulling in cold outside air and instead uses the warm air already circulating inside the car. Keeping the HVAC from working double time — first by warming up the freezing air it just pulled in, then getting it to the desired temperature — should, in the long run, help it last longer.

Alas, there is a right way and a wrong way to use this nifty little feature. First, turn on your car's heat and crank it to maximum. Let it reach a point where you start to feel a smidge of warmth, then push the recirculation button. This will amplify the air's warmth each time it passes through the HVAC system. Let it do its thing until you've hit that special Goldilocks level of comfort and then adjust accordingly. Keep in mind that the windows might start to fog up because the recirculated air will eventually become more humid. If that happens, turn it off and let drier clean air from outside circulate back through the system. If all else fails, you can always use a portable car heater. 

Even after the ice and snow have melted away and the blazing summer sun has once again returned to melt your skin the very second it touches the seat, be sure to keep using this feature. Instead of warming up cold air, it will help cool down hot air when using the air conditioning. Also, the recirculation feature can filter out noxious odors (like exhaust fumes) and other environmental pollutants you might encounter while out and about.