Keep Safe & Don’t Damage Your Vehicle When Starting In Arctic Weather
It’s been freezing for over a week now. That’s considerably cold for the UK, especially when you consider that it’s not been getting beyond freezing even at midday on many days. That produces lots of potential concerns for motorists, but many of them can be minimised or even totally dodged with a bit of attentionreduce, so does the pressure in your tyres. Very low tyre pressures cause all sorts of hazards, including poor transmission of power or braking effect, possibility of tyres separating from wheel rims, particularly when cornering hard. So, as temperatures fall, keep checking your tyre pressures & keeping them topped up to the necessary pressure.
Next, remember that cold weather punishes your battery in numerous ways. Firstly Foremost; as it gets colder, your battery loses it’s efficiency, and this problem is exacerbated by the fact that it’s much harder to turn over a cold engine, because the oil is thick, and the components are a much tighter fit when cold. Your battery’s age also makes this matter worse. On average, your battery will lose around 10% of its capacity every year . You can diminish this by making sure your battery is fully charged when you leave the vehicle for any length of time. A fully charged battery degrades much slower than a discharged one. Bear in mind also that when you fire up in cold weather, you utilise the heater blower, rear screen heater, lights, heated seats etc ,etc. All these things require power from your alternator, so there’s less electricity remaining to re-charge the battery.
If you keep your car in a garage, you’ll diminish all the battery related matters, you’ll also evade having your windscreen and other windows covered in ice and frost.
Ice and frost on the car windows causes safety matters due to reduced visibility. This is made worse by the fact that it takes so much more energy to soften the ice, and while that’s happening, you get a build up of condensation on the inside of the windscreen etc.
You should also know that Ice on the windscreen will produce standard rubber Wiper blades to freeze to the windscreen. If you just switch them on, you risk destroying the Wiper blades, or breaking the wiper arm or even the windscreen wiper transmission system.
Fitting Silicone Windscreen Wiper Blades will drastically decrease the chance of your windscreen wipers sticking to the windscreen. They’ll also flex much better under even the coldest clear the windscreen properly just when you need it most – on those freezing gloomy winter mornings.
For the greatest flexibility & cold wiping performance you should think about silicone Flat Wiper Blades, because these don’t have a jointed metal structure to seize, stiffen or corrode.
Filed under Automotive