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Dear All,

My sister & brother-in-law both doctors staying in England sent some photos yesterday of heavy snow fall experienced there.

It seems entire London was down with no transportation at all. This was their heaviest snow fall in last two decades. London is not prepared for heavy snow unlike Moscow, Toronto, etc.,

Would like to know from readers familiar with heavy snow fall areas how exactly is life at this time. Do your cars freeze or something?

By the way they own these cars, a BMW and a Toyota.

My car battery once died, needed jumper start. However car was 6 years old car and it snows a lot in Milwaukee.

Typically, washing a car and parking it outside when the temperature are seriously below zero can cause the doors to freeze shut.

Week batteries can die in extreme cold.

You have to use windshield washer with de-icer and antifreeze to keep it from freezing.

ABS suddenly becomes the most scary thing as you instantly know that you are breaking and there's zero traction!

The list goes on and on!

My brother wanted to go his office, but returned to home after seing that his nearby railway station is closed due to snow fall.

Some snaps from him...

A friend of mine in UK posted these pics just now on his profile. clap:

Everything came to a stand-still,with over 12" of snow falling in a short period of time. My cousin was lucky to have his office close to where he lives,so walking down wasn't an issue.Its the ice that caused bigger problems, when the temperature dropped the next day.

The country is not equipped for too much snow. They only have a few salt dispensing trucks and no snow ploughs. Once I had to walk back from work 5 miles in the hard snow. When i left for work that morning there was no snow. It snowed in the afternoon, only a little, but was enough to bring the traffic to stand still.

Some should ask Thad to visit this thread.

Ok... My exp in snow..
Here it is a pretty remote place and last wed it snowed 24 Inches.

Esp of driving. Each curve is scary as you don't know whether the car will skid Or not.

I have 1 year old Interstate batteries and It died once,.. Because of a raditor fan which disn't stop. otherwise I vouch By that "INTERSTATE BATERIES"

The issues are frost inside the windshield and scrape The ice off each glass.. Need to drive more than 2 miles to get the car warmed up

Shovel the driveway Off snow... Or rev the wheels to melt the snow below the tires. Bad on the axles. I needa axle replacement because of this.

The best things which run are the 4X4 jeeps and AWD subaru's

The snow situation was really bad down south. Though the A and B roads were in pretty bad shape.
Luckily I didn't have any problem with any of my cars and had to go to work (Sigh :))
Though the idea of going roof down in SL did cross my mind ;)

Let me guess, you are in the UP, go to Tech?

I started my car this weekend after 2 months. Batt was totally dead. Interstate that is 1.5 years old. It had an 85 months warranty so they gave me a new one for 30 bucks.

jesus christ..... there is one soul in team-bhp who knows about UP and tech.

yeah "it is hella snow here...... eh..." in yooper lingo..
and i thought.. it was cold there while i was in bangalore

I spent many years in Detroit and had a lot of colleagues from Tech. Heard all the crazy snow stories..like opening the window and leaving the beer on the snow outside (that is at window level) for so that it chills. ...but its was not the ground floor window but the 1st floor!!

my car door used to get frozen shut. i applied silicon spray lubricant on all rubber sealing parts and that problem is almost gone. the lowest we had was a little below zero (F). the window glass also freezes shut and the lubricant did not help there.

other than that, it's a usual routine. get out, locate the keyhole/unlock with remote, pull open the door (now it's easy with the lubricant), start the engine, rear defroster, and them take a scraper and start scraping the ice. if it's soft snow, just brush it off and take care not to heat the glasses, else when u park, all the snow that melted into water will freeze to bewcome become hard ice.

the longest i had to wait was around 30 mins 2 weeks back, after which i was able to clean the ice on the windshield.

then clean the area behind your wheels and rock the car back and forth till it gains traction and gets back to (hopefully) cleaned road.

if the roads are not cleaned/salted, stay at home :)

EDIT: it's a good test for your chipped windshields. if there are chips/cracks, water will get in, then freeze into ice, expand and crack the whole windshield. I have even heard people cracking them by using hot water or sudden heat from defroster to melt the snow/ice.

I was stuck at London Heathrow airport on the same day. I've uploaded a few bad quality snaps here:

http://www.team-bhp.com/forum/1162423-post558.html