Tuesday, January 16

How to Avoid Frost

I've never liked having to scrape my car off in the morning, and I've discovered something interesting about it's formation in the last couple of days. Both Monday and Tuesday morning I have left for work when it was about 20°F, and neither day have I had to scrape my car off. Perhaps it's a weird coincidence that despite the cold, both days I've escaped scraping, or it has to do with the fact that I've left at 5 in the morning both days. Whenever it is that frost forms, it isn't before 5am. It must then be forming from 5 to 8am? I'd run more tests, but it's terrible to get up this early.

Another frost note. We stayed at the Anderson's this last weekend, and because Kim had one Civic in Provo, we got to park in the garage. Their garage is unattached to their house, unheated, uninsulated and cold. But even with nighttime lows around 6°F, no ice forms on the car windows. How does the car know that it's indoors? Also, what constitutes "indoors"? What if the garage door is left open? Apparently you don't get ice on the windows from just cold weather. It's got to be cold, outdoors and at the crack of dawn.

2 comments:

Suzanne said...

I have found that you also don't get any frost on your windows when temperatures do not get above 20 degrees for days at a time. There's simply no moisture left in the air.

Adam Lowe said...

Frost is essentially frozen dew, and they both tend to occur in the early morning hours because that's when it's the most humid.

Why that is, I don't know.