A Winter Driving Tip for You and Your Volunteers

Maybe it’s happened to you…you get into your vehicle, start it up, and fog like something in a horror movie spreads over the inside of your windshield. You can’t see well enough to drive safely. The good news is that you can defog it pretty quickly. Also, there are simple ways to prevent the problem altogether.

You Have to Restore the Hot/Cold Balance

If your car has been in the cold, the outside surface of the windshield and windows is colder than the inside, and the difference is more pronounced as soon as you get in and start breathing. The relatively warm air inside will start to condense on the windshield, and the hot/cold battle will be joined.

Don’t Wipe The windshield with Your Hand!

Whatever condensation you remove will be replaced immediately by your huffing and puffing. Instead, do this:

• Let the engine warm a little, so it can help your heater do its job better. (Don’t do this in a closed garage, of course.)
• Turn on the heat, with the vents directed toward the windshield and windows. If you have a defroster setting – the button with the three squiggly lines – use that. Some vehicles have defrosters for both front and back windshields.
• If you have a button with a U-shaped arrow, make sure it’s not on. Otherwise, you’re just recirculating the moist air inside that wants to condense. What you want is to pull in drier air from the outside.

(The quickest way to balance the hot and cold in winter is to run your air conditioner for a couple of minutes with your windows down, but most people aren’t Spartan enough for that when it’s freezing.)

Next summer, the outside surface of your windshield will be warmer than the inside, so the condensation will be on the outside, and you can use your wipers to clear it. Now that we all understand that the objective is to balance hot and cold, you can guess that turning down the A/C a little, and opening windows, will help get rid of condensation faster in summer.

A Few Prevention Tips

• Keep your windshield and windows clean, inside and out. This prevents nucleation—water molecules adhering to dirt particles. A microfiber cloth works well for buffing.
• Apply a product such as Rain-X to provide a thin, transparent film on the outside of your windshield. It helps prevent condensation and makes rain bead up so it doesn’t fight with your wipers for primacy.
• To keep moisture down inside your vehicle, consider keeping a silica dehumidifier in your car. Or you can make your own dehumidifier by filling an old pair of tights with cat litter.
• Take wet things, like umbrellas or snow boots, out of your vehicle.

VIS members have 24/7 access to a rich variety of risk management resources, including “Preventer Papers” on vehicle safety. They are great for small-group safety training, or to give to volunteers individually. All the resources in our “VIS Vault” are included with VIS membership. Click on “Get Volunteer Insurance Now” on the home page, to begin protecting your volunteers with VIS. Questions? Call us at 800.222.8920.