Another thought. I've seen 12V immersion water heaters that plug into the lighter socket with an element that you hang over the edge of a cup into the water (see 12 Volt Water Heater). Perhaps you could adapt one of those to your needs.

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Carl

 

I'd second Carl's suggestion of using the heating tape. It's commonly used to keep water pipes from freezing in the winter, but it would probably work quite well to heat the wiper fluid for you. Most hardware stores should carry it.


Torben

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Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.

 

I don't think that the initial temperature of the fluid will influence its behavior once it's exposed to moving air as a mist.

More important are freezing (melting) point, volatility, surface tension, and the temperature of the glass. A detergent or alcohol helps a lot.

 

One good use I found for nichrome wire was for my dumpload on my RE based charge controller. I grabbed several 2Kw 240 volt immersion heaters from a scrap yard and simply cut some of the wire and put them in parrallel so I had a 4.9 ohm load resistance so when my charge controller hits 27.5 volts around 5.6 amps of current is drawn. I know you can buy replacement demister tape so that may be your wasiest option.

Cheers Bryan

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" The only way to avoid human error is to avoid the use of humans"

 

Thanks for all the input. Not sure whether I'm still going to do the heated washer jets thing but i certainly got a lot of useful info that I will be able to use for other projects. May just put together one of those polystyrene cutters for the time being, since I actually need one.

 

Woops TYPO...

The line should read" It should NOT be so hot that it glows."
Must have hit the 'ctl' key instead of 'shift'. That'll teach me to proof read before sending.
Sorry.

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A conclusion, is the point reached when you stop thinking.

 

Thanks for the correction, I was actually wondering about that.