It’s a freezing winter morning. You’re running late for work. The traffic report lists problems across all your routes. You make it into your car and look out to see, well, nothing. Your windshield is completely iced over.
It may be tempting to start squirting that windshield wiper fluid and dragging your blades across the caked-on ice, but don’t do it! Not only does this damage your windshield wipers, but it can also scratch your windshield itself. And maybe throwing a cup of hot water on your windshield also sounds like a good idea, but that is an excellent way to destroy your windshield or, at the very least, land you with some truly hard-to-remove ice (that hot water is going to cool to freezing very fast!).
The first thing you will want to do as soon as you’ve got into your car (if you have not yet already started it) is turn the defrost setting on high. It’s there for a reason, and the reason is to defrost the ice on your windshield! But yes, this can take a bit of time, especially on those days when Jack Frost has been particularly malevolent.
So here’s an incredible time-saving technique that we can thank science for! Rubbing alcohol and water. That’s it. Well 1/3 cups of water to 2/3 cups of rubbing alcohol, to be exact. Alcohol has a very low freezing temperature of -128oC so it will immediately begin melting the ice when sprayed onto your windshield. Within a few minutes, you should be able to easily take a scraper to your windshield and brush the slushy substance away.
No more mornings spent throwing your body weight into that ice scraper. No more time wasted waiting for your car’s defrost to finish melting all that ice. Simply make up a bottle (again, that’s 1/3 cups water to 2/3 cups of rubbing alcohol) and spray away! Because of it’s low melting point, you can also keep the bottle in your car so you don’t have to run back into the house with it after every spray; however, it is best to take it inside when you come home at the end of the day as it will work best on those pesky morning frosts when it is back up to room temperature.
