Bad Places Destroy Wiper Blade According To Experts.

June 13th, 2010

Western Europe is certainly not a stranger to the scourge of cold winters and sweltering summers. Fortunately for us we have a state of the art weather centre which is the envy of much of the continent. This weather centre can be used to accurately predict short term weather conditions, which is very bonny in the winter. The botheration with most replacement wiper blades these days is that they are all made from a variation of rubber, now this works quite well in moderate temperatures but in any crazy climate conditions the substance will tend to degrade. Further compounding this problem is that when winter strikes and the weather centre goes into overdrive guessing much more grit and salt for the roads, it’s our rubber replacement wiper blades which suffer. This is because as a by product of all the hard work invested by our dedicated road network maintenance teams the salt and grit from the road accordingly end up destroying the delicate rubber on our wipers.

Salt and grit are our primary and last line of defence when snow and ice threatens to close roads and cause mayhem with our network road systems and wipers. Salt and grit work in two different but complementary ways, one, they reduce the melting point of ice meaning the ice will turn back into water, two, they increase friction so cars don’t tail spin madly out of control like snoopy on ice. The problem with this technique is that the salt attacks the delicate rubber of our cars wipers a great deal reducing their life span and performance overall. Salt and grit are both very dense and very sharp, they act like sand paper and actively wear away the rubber on the replacement wiper blades not to mention scratching the glass on out wind screens. Once this thing is under way the tell tale signs of streaks and unbalanced wiping will be evident in the replacement wiper blades quality. Another issue with the whole grit and ice things is that the salt from the roads will surely be thrown up onto the wind screen and once this substance dries it will form a nice thick layer preventing hapless drivers from telling where the heck they are going.

Now this can be easily solved by taking out a container of warm soapy water and getting to work on the wind screen when you get home from work in the dark and the dead of winter. Another possibility is to utilize some form of washer fluid based on alcohol to help melt the ice and salt mixture clouding the wind screen but again unhappily this simple step will afflict the life span of your rubber wiper blades massively, you see they just aren’t engineered for these kinds of conditions. Or perhaps if I was more of a Machiavellian person I would guess the manufacturers were deliberately enforcing this kind of planned obsolescence product in order to maintain a constant flow of new customers. This type of practice is wide spread, not just in the wiper blades industry, fortunately there is an answer, silicone wiper blades, these do not wear, these do not abide from the effects of salt or ice, and they are extremely long lasting.

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