by Sam E. Jones

Created on: October 29, 2010

There are two ways ice can build up on your windshield. The first is from natural water in the air freezing onto your car when it’s sitting empty and alone, such as overnight. The second is when you’re driving and because it’s so cold outside and so humid inside the cab, the moisture from your breath begins to freeze onto the windshield making it difficult to see.

To prevent the first kind of ice buildup, which is actually just frost, or frozen dew, try wiping your windshield with a water and vinegar solution every couple of weeks. This usually works because vinegar sticks to your windshield when you do that, and vinegar has a lower freezing temperature than does the water that is in the air.

Something else you might try is a windshield cover. It’s basically a rubber mat that you lay over our windshield after parking. The rubber keeps the moisture from getting to the glass, which means it can’t freeze, which means no ice.

Also, you can try parking at a different angle. You might have noticed that frost is usually thicker on one side of a tree than another; this is quite often true of cars as well. Try backing in and see if that doesn’t make a difference.

As for the ice or frost build up on the windshield on the inside when you’re driving; this generally only happens when you are driving around in very cold weather, so cold that your heater can’t keep up with the moisture that is being constantly injected into the air as you breathe. The problem gets worse the colder it gets and the more people you have in your car.

One thing that can help a lot is to simply crack a few of the windows in the car to let the warm moist air out, instead of having it collect on your windshield.

Also, most cars have a setting on their heater or air conditioner that allows for recirculating air or sucking in new fresh air into the heater. Set it to suck in new fresh air as you want to get that moist air in your car out. Also, be sure you have your heater set to pure defrost, so that your windshield gets every bit of help it can from your heater.

Something else that sometimes helps is putting something, such as a book or stack of magazines on the dash to help deflect the airflow up at your windshield instead of back into your vehicle.

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