Winter Windscreen Wiper Blades - What Are They And Do You Need Them?

Posted by User Contributed

July 13, 2008

You’ve no doubt noticed how many Wiper Blades are at their least effective right you need them: on those freezing dark winter mornings. We’ve all struggled with Wiper Blades that have become rigid with the cold, so they can’t flex to the shape of the windscreen, and the result is that they only clear 1 or two patches on your windscreen, leaving you with drastically impeded vision, right when you most need an unimpaired view.

Even worse, on those extremely freezing mornings, especially when you’re in a rush, you forget to make sure that your wipers aren’t frozen to the screen. When you switch on the Wiper Blades one of three things happens. Firstly, if your extremely lucky, you’ll hear a crack as the wiperblade tears. If you’re not quite so lucky, there’ll be a deeper clunk as the Wiperblade Transmission Mechanism snaps, followed by a whining noise as the wiper motor races away without any load on it. If you’re very unfortunate, you hear almost nothing because your Wiper Motor will just overheat & burn out, leaving you immobilized and facing a big bill to get back on the road.

There are a couple of less dramatic, but equally expensive consequences of using normal Wiper Blades in extreme winter conditions:-

Firstly, You’ll need to use a Winter Screen Wash in order to stop the Washer System from icing up. Unfortunately this usually contains industrial alcohol mixtures which attack & destroy the rubber in normal Wiper Blades.

Secondly, especially on cheaply made normal type Wiper Blades, the many joints in the metal frame shrink and tighten as the temperatures fall. The immediate effect of this is that it further restricts the Wiper Blades ability to flex, but there’s also a problem of a build up of long term damage, because, as the wiper blade is forced to flex whilst the joints are so tight, the two parts of the joint are forced into each other, and a lot of wear ensues. The result of this is seen as soon as temperatures rise, the joints expand and become loose. This leads to vibration, noise and juddering. The knock-on effect of this is to cause the joints to wear even more, and as the joints become looser, they chatter and wear even when it’s relatively warm, so once the wear sets in, it just accelerates until the Wiper Blades become unusable.

Keeping all those problems in mind, a true winter wiper blade needs to have a blade which remains flexible beyond the temperatures experienced in a severe winter. Only Silicone Wiper Blades remain flexible down to -60°C. What’s more, ice doesn’t stick to Silicone Wiper Blades. If you’ve ever used a silicone Ice Cube Tray, you’ll remember how flexible it is as it comes out of the freezer, and how easily the ice cubes just slip out of their moulds.

A silicone blade conquers many of the problems relating to tearing & flexibility, but only when you combine Silicone Blades with a Flat Wiper Blades technology, do you completely surmount all the problems caused by wide temperature variations

So, you could say Silicone Windscreen Wiper Blades are great Winter Windscreen Wipers, which they undoubtedly are , but they’re much more than that, because unlike rubber, Silicone Wiper Blades are resistant to heat up to 200°C, and totally resistant to Ultra Violet, Ozone, Solvents and Pollution. Perhaps it would be it would be more accurate to call them Extreme Wiper Blades, because they’re as happy in the desert heat as in the arctic cold.

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