Why do you call them active when I told you that I wait till they go through the cycle? The reason I had to put autolites in and not motorcraft isn't because I'm cheap, Theres only a couple dollar difference. It's because when you work 6 days a week and your in the parts store on a sunday afternoon, and the tell you that they had to order the motorcraft's, so your kind of stuck with what they've got. I knew I was going to get harassed over it sooner or later. Maybe I'll install an other toggle to the main lead of the glow plug controller to shut the whole thing off while I'm preparing to blow myself to the moon.
One thing is, when people talk about cycling their glow plugs more then once. When I try to cycle it the second time, the wait to start light only stays on for a second. So I'm figuring that I'm not doing any good. Is that from the cheap plugs, or is there something else going on in there?
Something that I think is pretty cool though, is that there installing heaters on all the equipment at work that kick on at a programed time and heat the oil up for 2 hours, running off the vehicles batteries. So when we get there everything's warmed up and ready to start. There $1200 though.
A glow plug gets metal to red hot. Now, Have you ever taken a welding torch to a piece of metal and got it red hot, then sat there and waited on it to cool down to the touch? You've got a mighty long wait on your hands. Just the time it takes for the controller to quit cycling is not time enough for a glow plug tip to cool down.
If you don't believe me, maybe you'll believe the folks who manufacture the starter fluid
this is from the label of one of them:
"Valvoline Extra-Strength Starting Fluid with Upper Cylinder Lubricant is designed to start gasoline and diesel engines quickly in cold conditions.
Product Features:
* Safe and effective for year-round use in gasoline and diesel engines, including cars, trucks, lawn mowers, chain saws, marine engines and motorcycles;
not for use in diesel engines with glow plugs
* Regular use provides fast startups and prevents excessive wear on the battery and starter
* Combustion-ready at -40°F
* Made in the USA"
Other brands have similar warnings.
With ether it's either No glow plugs at all, or no ether Period!
If you disconnect the controller, you can shoot go juice in there fine.
But you have a functioning controller, so it makes sense to get the plugs
Since the way you describe the controller function, I'll assume you have a 7.3 , Ryder fleet products has
zd9 plugs for 10.83 ea and the
zd1a for 10.83 ea as well
The way you describe it short cycling , it already has at least one plug burned out, probably more, The controller is timed by sensing the internal resistance of the plugs which normally varies with temperature, but when you have one or more failed plugs in the circuit, it will cycle faster. A second cycling will always be shorter but should go more than 2 seconds, and anyway, off engine tests of autolites have show that burning them the time that it would take for the length of 2 complete burns would be long enough to burn out most autolite plugs the first time
) after my trip 
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