Windshield washer fluid/antifreeze?

It’s that time of year…

Snowbelt SE owners: what windshield washer fluid do you use? I’ve bought the Costco -40° stuff for what seems like decades, often adding a surfactant like Optimum No Rinse to it (1 oz per gallon), but the MINI manual says that the fluid should contain no additives with silicone, which most premixes include these days. I could pick up the concentrate at the dealership, but at a concentration good down to possible winter temperatures here (-6°F happens in December, but not often, which would be 1:1), it becomes pretty expensive by the gallon when the Costco stuff is $10 for four gallons. For January it would be even worse, needing a 3:2 mix to be adequate down to -25°F.

Do I have other choices?

 

I’ll pull out my Mr Wizard Junior Titration Kit and mix dynamically all season… except I don’t actually go through that much windshield juice — I haven’t added any since taking delivery four months ago. Last winter I think between both cars I used maybe five gallons (both of us commuting five or six days a week plus shopping and the usual extracurricular stuff).

 

Ok, well… ordering 12 pints off Amazon is cheaper than driving into midtown to the dealership (or even the closer BMW-only store) and buying pints one or two at a time. Maybe I will hold off until they call me to tell me that my stupid shutters are in and I’ll have them top it up while doing the repair.

 

As alluded to in another thread, I ordered a case of 12 pints of the BMW winter windshield washer fluid concentrate from Amazon. With tax, it works out to around CA$7 a pint (~US$5) compared to CA$17.99 (~US$13) at the dealership (I checked today). Kind of a no-brainer.

 

Amazon dot com

I paid $58.42 with Prime including NY sales tax (8%).

 

Contrary to what many (most?) Montrealers like to brag about (“It goes to 40 below!!”), it rarely goes into the -20s (°C) here for extended periods, and almost never into the -30s (our all-time record is -37.8°C, set 65 years ago). For example, our lowest daily high this year was -19.1°C (-2.4°F) in mid-January.

I’ll gamble with the 1:2 mix until a polar vortex settles in.

 

Yeah, Way Upstate New York is where most Canadians get their Amazon stuff. I’ve dealt with three or four package handling companies over the last 30 years, but I’ve stuck with one main one just 3 miles from the border since the late 90s.

During the border closures, I had the unique experience of visiting the “Halfway House,” a former pub straddling the frontier itself that had to change its vocation with the tightening of security after 9/11. With entrances to the building on both sides of the border, as long as one didn’t use the wrong door, one didn’t actually leave Canada or enter the US, and could turn around and proceed through Canadian customs to declare the legally-imported purchases.

Alas, the last time I went there was just before the border opened up early this year, when I found out that the 88 year old quebecois owner of the house, who ran this little gold mine full time, had recently passed. His American son-in-law was minding the store temporarily, sharing duties with the rest of the family while they figured out how to run it — they all have full time jobs and lives further across in NY and usually only helped with the web site and bookkeeping.

The place has a really interesting history, with an archive of photos from the 60s and 70s when people from both sides of the border would dock their motor boats and party on the deck and in the bar. It was a haven for American teens taking advantage of Quebec’s lax liquor laws and late closing hours. The pool table is still there amongst all the shelves and boxes And packages! There’s a line running across the floor of the main room indicating which side of the border is which. Just a really cool (and sadly, really run-down) place.

 

Went by BMW West Island at 2:50 pm and it was… closed?