Handy hint on defogging your car

[Deejay]

Morning all

I used to put a hot water bottle (full of hot water) :? on the driver's seat before I had my breakfast. The heat from it makes defrosting much easier, and you get a warm seat.

Cheers

Dave

 

[Racers]

Ford Focus, common car, but with electric heated windscreen, lurvely.

BugBear

I had a hired Ford Mondeo with a heated screen in summer, I kept noticing the wires and its not good in sunlight lots of glare , to me the disadvantages outweigh the advantages.

I found the brakes grabby as well, I was much happier back in my ALFA.


Pete

 

[JakeS]

For years I've been doing:

- Blower on full (obviously)
- Air from outside rather than cycle interior (really cold mornings are rarely as humid as the inside of a car that humans have been inconsiderately breathing in)
- Heat to maximum (hotter the air, the more moisture will evaporate into it - equilibrium thing IIRC)
- AC if you have it (dries out the air, meaning more fog can evaporate into it faster)
- Air at least partly, if not mostly, directly at windscreen (that's where the fog is, so blast the warm, dry air directly at it to remove the fog fastest. Otherwise you have to warm and dry the entire inside of the car first)

Angling the visors to trap or re-cycle the warm air against the window will almost certainly help, but - as with the air direction - you'll have to keep them like that as you drive off or you risk the moisture recondensing onto the windscreen as the dry air moves somewhere else and is replaced by moister air from the rest of the interior.

I saw a YouTube video recently that suggested the following avante-gard approaches:

- open the windows slightly. the reasoning was that cold air holds less water than warm air, so if you open the windows then the warm-and-now-moist air you've used to take the fog off the windscreen escapes and is replaced by dryer air from outside. The downside, of course, being that the air is freezing cold and it does nothing for your personal comfort!

- smear shaving foam over the inside of your window before it fogs. They did a comparison test against one of the commercial anti-fogging liquids and decided that shaving foam was just as good.

I've not tried either of these, my car's heating is aggressive enough that I rarely have to wait long to de-fog anyway.

(And I also go with the jug of tepid water for the windscreen for ice. I've had it re-freeze once, but a second jug sorted it out!)

 

[Sheffield Tony]

- open the windows slightly. the reasoning was that cold air holds less water than warm air, so if you open the windows then the warm-and-now-moist air you've used to take the fog off the windscreen escapes and is replaced by dryer air from outside. The downside, of course, being that the air is freezing cold and it does nothing for your personal comfort!

Same sort of logic: If you can bear it, when nearly home, turn the heaters off and roll down the windows for the last couple of hundred metres. You'll have a lot less condensation on the inside the next morning, having purged all the warm damp air.

Leaving your car with the engine running and all the heaters on is not great, not only because it is easily stolen and it wastes fuel, but it is not healthy for either the battery or the catalytic converter. I normally resort to the scraper, in bad conditions with the front/rear (Ford !) heated screens on whilst I scrape the sides. Not that it is often necessary in the last couple of "winters".

Edited to add: one really annoying backward progress in my latest Ford compared to the previous: on the old one, when the side windows were wet or misty, just rolling them down and back up again had a convenient wiping effect. Now there is a big enough gap that they come back up just as they went down.

 

[Jonzjob]

good way to crack your windscreen too (assuming there is a stone chip or some such in it)

Been doing it for 50 years without a problem.

Yes, me too and many of my screens have had small chips in them as well.

50 years :shock: :shock: :shock: !!!

Wouldn't it be quicker to scrape it off :twisted:

I once knew a real smatrass who saw a neighbour using warm water. He thought it would be much quicker with hot water instead. He got a bucket full and chucked it at the windscreen. The first thing iit hit was the glass and the next was the 2 front seats. Prattt!

 

[Fatboy]

When I used to teach scuba diving I had a student who thought she would try the same trick we used to stop our masks misting up under water; a bit of spit wiped around, a quick sluice out and away you go. We caught her spitting on her windsceen thinking it might work....she was blonde as it happens

 

[Gimlet]

When you get up in the morning and have a cup of tea, pop the remaining water into a hot water bottle, go out and lay it on the dash of the vehicle. Works a treat! Just make sure you have your pants on though!

(edit... sorry Dave, I missed your earlier post re the water bottle )

 

[Jonzjob]

I used to put a vacuum cleaner in mine. Switched on of course. It blows out quite a lot of warm air and not just clears the windows, all of them, but warms the dar as well. About 10 mins does the job.

 

[Rorschach]

I use the warm water on the windscreen, temp about that I would want to wash my hands in, warm but not hot, clears the screen very quickly. Currently testing the shaving foam as well, early indications are good!

 

[Slinger]

Before car heaters, we used to cut up a potato in half & smear it on the windscreen & back window. Seemed to work.
Slinger

 

[biskit]

Don't seem to have that problem just drive out of the garage !! Great. :?

 

[Zeddedhed]

I drive a 1987 Landrover 110 Defender. De-icing/De-fogging routine is simple - wait until spring.

 

[graduate_owner]

So annoying that my garage space (and there's plenty of it) is cluttered up so the car won't go in. I must start a clear up one of these days.

K