Winter transmission heater

In very cold areas with arctic winter weather of -20F or lower, is there any benefit to using a pad heater of 100W range to keep the automatic transmission warmer than ambient? I drove my truck in that weather and never had any issues with the transmission shifting, but was curious anyway.

I have the block heater installed and intend to install an oil pan heater, with a battery warmer and maintainer on a temperature thermostatic plug.

 

very interesting..my MPG suck bad in the winter. Everylittle bit would help I imagine.

Get a timer to go off extension cord like 30mins before you drive and in theory it should help. Now would the cost of electricity exceed the benefits??

 

I plug my truck in at work, no cost to me.

 

How did this work out for you? The block heater, oil pan heater, battery heater, and transmission heater? Any pictures/advice? I'm thinking about doing this before this winter hits. It snowed today and it's freaking October and we are already at 30F. Last winter was real bad too.

 

I think we'll find out in a couple months. I don't think it's a necessary thing, but it's a fairly cheap mod that surely can't hurt. The normal 250W pad heaters are too large for the V6 oil pan, so I was thinking about installing a pair of 125W heaters or maybe a single one instead.

 

Since I have my scangauge to show transmission oil temperature, I can say that at these low temperatures we are getting right now up north, It takes quite a bit for the TFT temp to go above 100F... Maybe it could help a bit on fuel economy.

Also, speed treshold for converter lock-up in fifth speed is higher when transmission fluid temp is very low. Normally my converter locks up from 50 KM/H, but when it's cold outside, even at full engine temperature, my converter locks up only from 62-63 KM/H, untill later when the TFT is higher. This has some impact on city MPG.

 

I wouldn't think there's much benefit to warming an auto transmission, they build up heat pretty quickly. As far as the engine goes, I believe the 4.0L comes ready to accept a block heater. Just buy the OEM block heater, drop it in and done. There's a plugged hole in the back of the engine made to accept the block heater.

 

Know of anywhere to buy the oem engine block heater cheap?

 

This:
http://www.trdparts4u.com/scripts/prodView.asp?idproduct=-5127

or this: (cheaper, non-OEM version)
http://www.tacomaworld.com/forum/technical-chat/172214-block-heater-part.html