Just got a German built car and the washer fluid it came with from the factory is pure alcohol! Why do they use pure alcohol and not the synthetic stuff we use in North America? Is it better?
Does it claim to be pure alcohol? (Woodgrain? Isopropyl?) Or is it simply clear or pale-colored with an alcoholic odor?
I had a German-built car and have encountered others and never ran into alcohol-substituting-as-wiper-fluid.
(Did the dealer screw up and put the wrong stuff in your reservoir?)
I remember Benzes used some clear concoction that had a lot of isopropyl in it. I think isopropyl alcolhol has some characteristic that makes water run off of the windshield faster, sort of like RainX, which also uses a lot of isopropyl.
It may also help prevent freezing on those cold German nights.
It smelled like isopropyl alcohol. If I understand from the previous response, isopropyl alcohol repels water. So, why wouldn’t they use it in N. America if it does that? Or do we use another chemical which does the same thing but without the stink?
Heh, my first answer would be “because American car makers don’t know their asses from a hole in the ground.” But more likely, our stuff is cheaper.
Incidentally, Benz washer fluid comes as a concentrate, to which water is added. The isopropyl may merely be an anti-freeze, and the presence of isopropyl in RainX may just be a coincidence. But I stand by my earlier opinion: something in both makes the water stream off the windshield faster than normal, and isopropyl is common to both.
Oh, one more thing, and then I’ll shut up. We (and other dealerships) used to have a real problem with our… more challenged… employees not realizing that the Benz fluid was a concentrate. Only a few capfuls out of a small ten-dollar bottle was needed to mix the fluid. The concentrate itself has a sort of orangish cast to it if the light is right.
Fairly often we’d have used cars come in with orange fluid in the reservoirs. The common joke was “so that’s why the guy traded it in. He found out it costs eighty bucks to refill the washer fluid!”
Why put alcohol in it? It could strip or mark the paint. Somethings weird here, maybe you opened the radiator or one of the other fluid containers. Anyway, I would’t want alcohol in mine or anything else that might effect the paint.
My bottle of wiper fluid has a skull and crossbones on it with the words “POISON! METHYL ALCOHOL! IF YOU DRINK THIS, YOU ARE FUCKED!!!” (or something to that effect). I know it is not pure, because it is blue (that, and it is really hard to get that last bit of water out of methanol).
Methanol is used to:
A. dissolve all of those bug guts off of your windshield, and
B. melt any ice off of your windshield.
Every gallon bottle of washer fluid I have ever seen has the same warning, so I would assume they all contain methanol.
FWIW, LandRover uses alcohol, also.
–Tim
Isopropanol is volatile. So whatever you squirt onto the windshield evaporates and leaves no residue behind. So while it may be found in both windsheild washer fluid and rainX, its not the water repellent ingredient of rainX.
Lots of water insoluble compounds WILL dissolve in isopropanol. Probably it’s used as a solvent for the water repellant (therefore water insoluble) ingredient in Rain X.
As far as isopropanol as an anti-freeze is concerned, it will be effective, though not as good as methanol, which freezes at a lower temp.
The active ingredient in Rain-X is Dichlorodimethylsilane.
(CH[sub]3[/sub])[sub]2[/sub]Cl[sub]2[/sub]Si
The alcohol is just a convenient solvent that goes away when you apply the stuff to the windshield.
And as for methanol vs. isopropanol vs. whatever - who knows. Surely one property they want to provide is a lower freezing point. And dissolving bug guts was a really good answer too. I hadn’t thought of that.