Hello All,

Greetings from Chicagoland.

Just wanted to share with you some of the things I do to make winter driving & parking easier. If you live in an area that doesn't get too cold or doesn't snow, please disregard this. Also, for those of you who live in a colder area may know something I don't know, so please share your ideas.

When parking at the end of the day, I do the following:

1. Tilt the wiper blades upright, so they will not freeze onto the windshield the next morning.

2. Avoid using parking brake, unless absolutely necessary. Sometimes p-brakes freeze. For automatic tranny, "P" should keep the car stationary, unless parking on a downhill. For manual, "1" or "R" should keep the car from rolling (but sometimes either gear allows the car to roll, in such case p-brake may have to be used).


I also do the following:

3. Make sure all exterior light bulbs are working.

4. When starting in the morning, a quick way to defrost your car is to run the A/C at defog position with the blower at full blast, temp dial at "80", with "REC" on. This warms up the interior quick. Once the interior is warmed up, switch off REC, as window fogging may result. Also, turn the rear/mirror defogger on (my rear defogger takes forever to work for some reason).

5. For automatic tranny, I found that the winter mode doesn't help sometimes. I believe it let you start from the 2nd gear, rather than the 1st, but today in Chicago the winter mode didn't do any good. For manual, you can manually start in the 2nd gear if the front wheels spin too much.

6. Be easy on the gas pedal for 15 minutes or so, until all fluids warm up.

7. If your ABS is inoperative, you can manually ABS your car, by pumping the brake pedal quickly & repeatedly. This takes some getting used to, though.

8. In really slippery roads, you may want to keep the top gear at 3rd. This way you have engine brake & better traction.

9. Check the concentration of coolant with coolant hydrometer.

10. Replace battery if it is more than 4 years old.

11. Use good all-season/snow tires if you can afford them (I couldn't).

12. Keep the fuel tank full, and put in a bottle of isopropyl alcohol (dry gas) if you haven't used one for the last few months.


I wish you luck in winter driving. Watch out for black ice.


Regards,


JPN

 

This is one of the techniques that I use to prevent rust...

Purchase a ceramic heater, without thermostat and with tip-over (or over-heat) safety feature. I purchased mine from Target for $20.

Purchase 15 or 20 amp electrical outlet timer -- Heavy Duty, not one designed for turning on/off household lamps.

Place ceramic heater on concrete garage floor. Place a concrete block or metal flashing between ceramic heater and wall (My wall is made with sheetrock drywall). Set ceramic heater to "Low Heat" fan setting.

Plug in and set electrical timer to turn on for a half-hour at 2 hour intervals throughout the night.

The ceramic heater may not do a very good job at heating your garage. However, it does a wonderful job of burning the humidity out of the air in your garage -- minimizing rust on your car.

Before I used my ceramic heater technique, I placed 120 watt light bulbs in the ceiling fixtures of my garage. I would leave my garage lights turned on throughout the night. The light bulbs would help burn the humidity out of the air in my garage.

 

nice advice....i may be needing all of what you wrote down for my future reference haha