I was stationed at Grand Forks AFB, ND a few years back. Spent a year and a half there. That was the coldest place I've ever been on earth. I've felt -70 F with the windchill. Not sure why anyone would ever want to live in the place like that. It wasn't bad in the summer though. It actually got pretty hot in the summer. I saw 100 degrees for a few days straight, but it was a dry heat. The temperature spread at that place is amazing. The mosquitos are ridiculously bad in the spring time there also. All the snow that melts in the spring lays in the fields for weeks and breeds mosquitos the size of helicopters.
Of course the Air Force was nice enough to send me to the Middle East quite a few times where it was a 150 degrees F in the summer, so I've felt what hell feels like on fire and frozen over!
I didn't have my MS3 then. I had a Honda S2000. I installed a block heater myself. It was easy in that car, but it was RWD, so the block's drain plug was easy to get to. I hear the MS3's plug is on the turbo side. Not very easy to access. The block heater worked pretty well. I kept the car in the garage overnight when I was home and had it on a timer to start heating the block at around 4am to give it 3 hours or so of heating before I left. My garage wasn't heated, so when it was -20 F ambient outside, it was probably 10-15 degrees in my garage. Once I was at work, we had power recepticles in the parking lots to plug our cars in, so I kept it plugged in all day long when it was below zero. The S2000 has 11.0:1 compression, so I wanted to keep it warm for easy starting. I also ran a 5W-30 weight oil between Dec-Feb (normal weight was 10W-30). I had Redline fluid in the tranny and rearend also. One other thing I did was buy a solar panel that I could connect to my battery and leave in my windshield to trickle charge it. I kept the wires connected to the battery and ran them into the cabin so I could just disconnect the panel when I wasn't using it.
I'd also recommend building a survival kit for the trunk if you plan on commuting during blizzards, which I don't recommend. It can get really nasty in ND during the winter. People drive off roads in blizzards up there and are found dead, frozen like ice pops a week or two later. When the weather is bad, I recommend just shack'n up at home and not coming out until it's over. Good luck!
