Everyday Blog

You’ve no doubt remarked how many Windscreen Wiper Blades are at their worst right you need them: on those freezing dark winter starts. We’ve all struggled with Windscreen Wiper Blades that have gone hard with the cold, so they can’t flex to the shape of the windscreen, and the result is that they only clear 1 or 2 patches on your windscreen, leaving you with drastically impaired vision, just where you most need an unobscured view.

Even worse, on those really freezing mornings, especially when you’re in a rush, you forget to make sure that your wipers aren’t frozen to the windscreen. When you switch on the Windscreen Wiper Blades one of three things occurs. Firstly, if your very fortunate, you’ll hear a crack as the wiperblade cracks. If you’re not quite so fortunate, 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 hefty bill to get back on the road.

There are a couple of less dramatic, but equally costly consequences of using standard Windscreen Wiper Blades in frozen winter conditions:-

Firstly, You’ll have to use a Winter Screen Wash in order to stop the Washer System from icing up. Unfortunately this usually contains industrial alcohol blends which attack & weaken the rubber in traditional Windscreen Wiper Blades.

Secondly, especially on cheaply made traditional type Windscreen Wiper Blades, the various joints in the metal frame shrink and tighten as the temperatures drop. The immediate effect of this is that it further hampers the Windscreen Wiper Blades ability to bend, but there’s also a problem of a build up of long term damage, because, as the wiper blade is forced to bend whilst the joints are very tight, the 2 parts of the joint are ground into each other, and a lot of wear ensues. The result of this is shown 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 simply accelerates until the Windscreen Wiper Blades become unserviceable.

With all these problems in mind, a true winter wiper blade needs to have a blade which remains flexible beyond the temperatures experienced in a hard winter. Only Silicone Wiper Blades stay 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 banishes many of the problems relating to tearing & flexibility, but only when you combine Silicone Blades with a Flat Wiper Blades technology, do you completely banish all the problems caused by wide temperature variations

So, you could say Silicone Wiper Blade are fantastic Winter Windscreen Wiper Blades, which they indubitably are , but they’re much more than that, because unlike rubber, Silicone Wiper Blades are resistant to heat up to 200°C, and completely impervious 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.