damian said:
kimberlee81 said:
A couple of other reasons not to put your wipers in the up position:
...in the event of a major dump while you're on the hill, once the sun comes back out, accumulated snow can slide down the windscreen and damage the arms almost as effectively as said knobs.
You've got that wrong IME*. Leaving them up allows the snow to flow around the arms. Snow is very viscous as it warms. Leaving them down allows them to form 'dams', and they will get bent. However, this is much more of a problem in vans, rather than cars with hoods.
If you do not want shredded wipers, and wipers which generally work well in snow, get winter silicone wipers. Light years better than normal rubber ones.
Plastic bags is a great idea.
*IME = I get between 9 and 12m cumulative snow fall in my driveway each season, and plenty of warm that immediately follows.
Just about all of the people at Nozawa Onsen in Japan leave theirs up.
It's an absolute must to put the rear wiper up at the back of my station wagon, as you can get huge pressure on it if you leave it down, because of the reasons Damian mentioned.
Another question is about ice (although the plastic bags would fix that to some extent). Try driving with heavy snow falling, with very fine powder dropping on the windscreen and melting because of the heat from the inside of the car. I had one episode at Shiga Kogen last season, where is was snowing unbelievably hard and my wipers accumulated rock hard ice over just 10 minutes, one cm thick!!! Ok, it was -15C.
So if you leave your windscreen wipers down when you park in that situation, they will be so frozen solid to the windscreen, and no scraping will remove it. Also, if some of the half melted snow slides down into the well just below the wipers, you can end up with the wipers frozen in there, where none of the windscreen demisting air can melt it.