February may be the shortest month of the year, but it sure feels longest. Especially when it's such a brutal, frigid, snowy February as the one we've had this year. Fortunately, it looks like March will bring some relief: for my area, at least, the weather forecast shows that daytime temperatures should be consistently peaking above the freezing point all month, and by the middle of the month it might get up to a balmy 50 to 55 degrees. But we've still got three more days of winter chill to plow through before we get there, so I figured I might as well share a quick roundup of useful tips for wintry weather.
First, from the Tip Hero website, a recipe for a simple homemade ice melter you can make with common household ingredients. The website has a video that shows how to do it, but in a nutshell, you just fill a gallon jug half-full with warm water, then add six drops of ordinary dish soap and two ounces of rubbing alcohol. I already know from experience that rubbing alcohol will melt ice, but I'm not sure what the dish soap is for; perhaps it makes the alcohol solution penetrate the ice better, or something. In the interests of proper reporting, I mixed up a half batch of this in my own kitchen and tried it out on some ice in our driveway that we didn't manage to clear away after the last snowfall. As you can see from the pictures, it didn't really make all that much impression on the ice. It washed away a bit of it, but I'm not sure plain hot water wouldn't have worked equally well. It certainly didn't do any better than the commercial ice melt I tried earlier in the day, and it isn't nearly as convenient to use, since a single batch only covers a small patch of ice. But if the stores happened to be completely out of ice melt (a situation we encountered last winter), this stuff would probably do the job in a pinch.The 2nd tip, moreover from Tip Hero, is set improving your gasoline mileage in bloodless climate. The article is genuinely about getting higher gasoline mileage in trendy, but maximum of the tips in it relate specially to wintry weather driving. For example, the writer notes that a cold engine does not run as efficaciously, so keeping your car in a storage wherein it is at least fairly blanketed from the bloodless will help it arise to its ideal jogging temperature more quickly. It additionally recommends combining short trips, so you'll be starting the engine while it's miles already warmed up?Which is good recommendation even in warmth weather. Unfortunately, we do no longer have a garage to stash our vehicle in, and there may be not plenty we can do approximately the more than one brief trips Brian has to make from side to side to work. (We suspect the drop in our commonplace gas mileage each wintry weather has as a minimum as loads to do with the reality that he cannot bike to paintings within the wintry weather, and so extra of the car's miles are town riding instead of motorway the usage of, because it has to do with the cold itself.)
The 1/3 tip comes from the Readers' Tips segment within the Dollar Stretcher. It's about making your property greater comfortable within the wintry climate via boosting the indoor humidity. This reader indicates doing all of your laundry within the midnight and letting the garments cling to dry, such as their moisture to the air. This in all likelihood would no longer artwork too well in our residence, wherein the middle of the night temperature is within the 50s and the humidity has a tendency to be over 50 percent even within the wintry weather; most in all likelihood, the clothes would not be everywhere close to dry with the useful resource of morning. But if you have to do laundry besides, there's no real downside to doing it this way. Even if the humidity raise is trivial, it must nonetheless reduce down quite on dryer time and prevent some electricity.
And ultimately, here is a just-for-a laugh thought from this week's Tip Hero e-publication: snow ice cream. This is a piece more complicated than really pouring syrup on the snow to make snow cones; you want to harvest two to 3 quarts of
So here's hoping these tips will help see you through the last of winter in reasonable comfort, and we'll all make it through to spring quickly.
