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Yes, I have a Stewart Warner gas heater, thanks for explaining! I'm going to check the ignition on it and how it works.

You folks should not feel embarrassed about your lack of knowledge of gasoline-powered cabin heaters. It isn't an area many car buffs are familiar with, or even need to know about.

They continue to be in regular use in aircraft, where they have demonstrated they are both safe, reliable, and very effective. Durn right it is pretty slick to have lots of heat, almost instantly, in a cold aircraft.

They are a good and safe answer for applications where there is not an ample supply of hot water (where a ordinary fan blowing over an ordinary radiator core of some kind can supply ample cabin heat). As in air-cooled motors.

The three major types in use today are the Janitrol, Stewart Warner, and C & D ( recently bought up by Hartzell).

With the kind of modern controls used in aircraft today, they are delightful in their ability to hold steady any cabin temp. the operator wishes. No more of the "roast or freeze" phenomena of the pre-war types!

As another poster noted, once we had hi temp antifreezes, they faded from use in water-cooled surface transport.

The simple answer is cost. The gasoline-fired cabin heater is are far far more expensive to produce & maintain than the ordinary "fan over hot radiator" systems in use in automotive practice today.

And they are more complex to maintain. To obtain the reliability and safety of the modern gasoline-fired furnaces, expensive and complicated controls are necessary.

Even in the earlier models seen in automotive use, there had to be some way of protecting the user with redundancy, from any number of malfunctions. Maintaining those systems can be costly and labor - intensive.

My recommendation - forget about the gasoline-fired furnace concept for any water-cooled automobile or truck today.

If your car has one, remove it and install a modern "hot water" system. They are relatively inexpensive, and totally reliable.

True, you will have to wait about three to possibly as much as five minutes of normal driving to get really toasty, but the alternative is simply not worth the cost and effort.