Here in the United Kingdom We are enjoying one of the coldest winters for many years. The good news is that it has all been forecast fairly accurately in advance, and because of that Road Maintenance Contractors have been able to treat all the main roads with salt and grit.
Salt and grit are excellent for combating the build up of ice on the road, and providing a little additional traction if the ice does build up, but regrettably, if you don’t take a few precautions, they can at worst ruin your Wiper Blades, and at best cut down their life.
Salt and grit, are of course very abrasive, and as such they’ll grind down the Windscreen Wiper Blades tip, and so cause a dangerous streaky wipe. When this happens, there’s no answer but to renew your Windscreen Wiper Blades immediately.
A very nasty problem when driving in winter is the salt spray that comes up from the roads. As soon as it dries it forms a very opaque coating on the windscreen, and this problem is made worse at night because of the veiling glare as light from approaching headlamps and street lights falls on the salt coating.
In order to get rid of the salt coating, you need to use your screen washers very often, but in winter weather, your windscreen washer nozzles can quickly freeze up. To stop this you use a winter screen wash which normally contains isopropyl alcohol. This lowers the washer fluid freezing temperature, but annoyingly, it also attacks and softens the rubber in normal Windscreen Wiper Blades.
Consequently, with normal rubber Windscreen Wiper Blades, you just can’t win. Either the salt and grit will grind down your wiper blade tips and ruin them, or the alcohol will attack & degrade the rubber to such an extent that the tip will become deformed & the rubber will break at the points where it is fixed to the Windscreen Wiper Blades metal frame.
Fitting Silicone Wiper Blades can make a massive difference in overcoming these problems. Firstly the silicone resin is very much more resistant to wear than a rubber blade, and secondly, it’s totally impervious to attack by isopropyl alcohol.
That just leaves us to overcome the problem of maintaining wiper blade flexibility in freezing weather. Firstly, rubber loses its flexibility extremely rapidly as temperatures drop below zero, and secondly the metal frame can lose much of it’s ability to flex as its joints shrink with the lower temperatures, and corrode because of the ingress of salt water.
Silicone Windscreen Wiper Blades remains flexible down to -60?C, however the blade cannot bend if the frame holding it has become rigid due to corrosion and very low temperatures. To beat this problem, you can now buy Silicone Flat Wiper Blades.
Because Flat Wiper Blades have no joints, they won’t tighten and stiffen, nor will they oxidise. Bringing together the technologies of Flat Wiper Blades and Silicone Windscreen Wiper Blades promises an excellent all year round solution.
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