Waynne Cram, the service manager at Concord Nissan, says windshield wipers up is the way to go.
Waynne Cram, the service manager at Concord Nissan, says windshield wipers up is the way to go. Credit: GEOFF FORESTERโ€”Monitor staff

As more snow and ice comes our way in what is proving to be a belated winter, it is time to consider a thorny seasonal question: When a winter storm is coming, do you park your car outdoors with windshield wipers up or do you leave them down?

I have written about this cold-weather quandary many times and have heard heated debate (so to speak) on both sides, but for one expert thereโ€™s no doubt.

โ€œI am a big fan of wipers up,โ€ said Waynne Cram, service manager at Concord Nissan, a place that has lots of experience with vehicles parked outdoors in winter.

Why? โ€œThat keeps the rubber from freezing to the glass.โ€

And whatโ€™s wrong with that? Nothing necessarily, unless you left the wipers running when you turned off the car the night before, or you turn them on as soon as you start the car. Then you can damage the wiper motor.

โ€œPeople get in their car, they fire it up, the wipers are on โ€ฆ they try to move but canโ€™t. The linkage arm, the nut and bolt that hold it together, will start to back-thread,โ€ he said.

Or maybe worse: One Monitor editorโ€™s child recently had a wiper break in half due to this very scenario. The car was built in 2008, so it wasnโ€™t exactly new either.ย 

If you did leave the wipers down and theyโ€™ve got ice all over them when you get to your car, make sure the wipers arenโ€™t turned on before you start the engine and carefully use a scraper to break the ice holding the wipers to the glass.

The big drawback about leaving wipers in the up position is that it can weaken the spring that holds the blade firmly against the glass, so it does a worse job of actually clearing the windshield โ€“ not a good thing in winter.

Cram acknowledged that possibility but said itโ€™s only a concern if you frequently leave the wipers up, instead of doing it a few times each winter.

โ€œMaybe if we lived in Minnesota, where it snows all the time. Not here,โ€ he said.ย 

Cram said he leaves his wipers up only if he knows thereโ€™s a real storm coming โ€“ which hasnโ€™t happened too often this winter, alas.

Other concerns from the donโ€™t-put-wipers-up crowd include fear that hooligans wonโ€™t be able to resist breaking them off; fear that theyโ€™ll get damaged because ice gets packed around the exposed housing; and fear that it looks dorky (which, admittedly, it does).

Despite Cramโ€™s belief, incidentally, Concord Nissan leaves the wipers down on all the vehicles in theirย lotย when a storm is coming, but thatโ€™s because car dealers are more methodical about post-storm cleaning than you and me. Theyย  scrape and clean and run the engine enough to melt the ice, having first ensured that the wipers arenโ€™t on.

โ€œThat works for us. But the average person, they donโ€™t want to spend 40 minutes prepping the car in the morning,โ€ Cram said.

David Brooks can be reached at dbrooks@cmonitor.com. Sign up for his Granite Geek weekly email newsletter at granitegeek.org.