Nino’s 2018 Winter Survival Tips – Keep A Bottle of Alcohol

One of the last things you want to waste time doing is scraping the ice off of a FROZEN windshield when you're in a hurry trying to get to work! One thing MANY people do, which I strongly discouraged in my last blog, is letting their car idle with the heat on until a small patch of windshield gets clear enough to see through.

A better solution is to keep a bottle of alcohol handy to spray on the windshield. Not the 40 proof kind of alcohol, but a bottle of Isopropyl rubbing alcohol (the clear kind, not the green). Make sure its at least 50% alcohol and the high the percentage the better (I use 90%). Get a bottle that has a  spray nozzle a pour the alcohol into that if doesn't already come with one and attached it.

Be sure sure dust off a much loose SNOW as you can off your windshield so the alcohol can make as much contact with the actual ICE as possible. Spray the alcohol solution DIRECTLY onto to the windshield and watch the ice begin to simply melt away.

They way it works is since pure alcohol doesn't FREEZE, once in makes contact with the ice it warms it up and turns it back into water (Yayyy science class!). That's why it's best to get the highest concentration of alcohol because too much water will just freeze back onto windshield and make the problem worse.

Be sure to check out my next survival tip to know what to do when you lose traction on the ice!