Expert: Mike Evans - 6/23/2009

Question
with diesel glow plugs, if someone starts the truck without waiting for the dash light to disappear, will that burn them out? this only happened once after I replaced them.

Answer
    No, it won't hurt them at all.  Glow plugs wear out internally from the tremendous heat they generate.  Lots of people will start Diesels (sot so much the new Diesel pickups, they have rather complicated computers controlling everything) in the summer without using the glow plugs at all.  My brother had an old Mitsubishi D-50 with a turbo-Diesel that even started well in the winter with no glow plugs.  He would have kept driving it but all of the cab mounts rusted free of the body and the cab sort of fell off the truck.
    Oh, and, not to be pedantic (well, just a little), let's spell Diesel with a capital "D;" it is the man's name after all.  Rudolf Diesel died young, falling off a ship (some say pushed (espionage was maybe involved)) in the English Channel.