Averaged quantities in the coronal part of the simulation domain as a function of time. We define t = 0 s as the time when we start collecting snapshots after the simulation extended to the coronal part has run for an hour of solar time. Panel a shows the temperature, panel b the electron density and panel c the sum of viscous and resistive heating. All quantities have been averaged over regions with densities below 10⁻¹² g cm⁻³. The vertical dashed lines highlight several strong heating events. For a discussion of the time evolution see Sects. 3.1 and 4.1.