A Simple Trick for Defrosting Your Windshield in Less Than 60 Seconds

As beautiful as a winter snowfall can be, any real accumulation of the white stuff is certainly not without its irritations—especially if you have to shovel a walkway to your vehicle, then hop in the car and drive somewhere.

If all that shoveling wasn’t already an unwelcome workout on its own, you also likely have a a frozen windshield with which to contend. Many people have their own special tips and tricks for warming up their car in record time in the cold-weather months, and Ken Weathers is no exception.

Weathers—the very appropriately-named meteorologist who works at WATE in Knoxville, Tennesse—is a bit of a viral sensation.

All the way back in 2016, Weathers posted a video on YouTube in which he shared his favorite trick for defrosting a car windshield in less than 60 seconds. In the years since, nearly 10 million people have watched Weathers’s cold-weather hack—and millions of them now swear by his homemade defrosting recipe, which is incredibly easy to make.

Just grab a water bottle and fill it with a simple solution of one part water and two parts isopropyl or rubbing alcohol and mix the solution. Give your windshield a couple of good sprays of the mixture and watch that sheet of ice quickly disappear.

“The reason why this works is [that] rubbing alcohol has a freezing point of 128 degrees below freezing,” says Weathers. “So you can always keep this mixture in your car, and it will never freeze."

Watch the video above to see the spray in action.

A version of this story ran in 2019; it has been updated for 2024.

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