Honda Car Forum

I bought this intake system that has a black painted alluminum intake pipe with a regular cone....i was wondering if the black color will draw hot air into my engine?

Not at all. Youre referring to black being prone to absorbing and retaining heat from light... ie sunlight. It has something to do with the color (or absence of color) not being capable of reflecting (or bouncing off) certain wavelengths or spectrums of light from a black surface. Like a black t-shirt on a summer day... or the black asphault that gets insanely hot in the summer...instead it retains the energy which is converted into heat.EDIT EDIT EDITTo the person below me, i think you may have misread my answer... but then again it sounds like you reworded exactly what i said. The concept of "heatsoak" as you called it happens under the hood, and stays under the hood as you put it... where there is NO light... Any heat that is created and or retained in anything under the hood, has absolutely NOTHING to do with the color black. Black only absorbs heat (actually it absorbs light, which as i stated earlier, uses that energy and turns it into heat) more than colors because of its inability to deflect LIGHTWAVES. only thing it can do is absorb it. Black objects will not retain or draw in heat any more than yellow objects if that heat is not being generated by light energy. In a dark environment there would be absolutely NO difference.

Truthfully it does not matter what color the pipe is. The person above me was on the right track, but not quite there. The effect of heat soak happens on most of the engine during operation. The heat created by the engine stays under the hood and the objects absorb the heat. The color black absorbs sunlight more than any other color, not heat itself.