If you're like me and park your car outside, you probably woke up this morning to a car covered in about an inch of ice and sleet. I was unable to get in my car this morning, let alone even unlock it. Water had gotten into the lock and prevented my drivers side door from unlocking. Because of that, none of the other doors would unlock due to the remote entry system. I would try to unlock the passenger side door and right away it would automatically lock back up. I dunno if that is a malfunction... or a feature.

Anyways, I found that it was best to try to chip away at the ice on the car in small chunks. I used a punch from my toolbox. If you don't have one of those, you could use a screwdriver, but just be careful since there's a car underneath all that ice. I started with the door edges until I had freed the door. Chipping the ice made it easy to remove the giant sheets of ice. Got in from the passenger side and started the car to warm things up. The heat from the engine should be enough to melt the ice off the hood.

You can run the front and rear defrosters to melt the ice on the windshield and rear glass. I actually had an ice scraper from my years in Baltimore that helped to break up the window ice. I let the car run for about 10-15 minutes so that it could warm up to temperature and also melt things and prevent things from getting worse.

Also, by scraping the windows I was able to free up my wipers from the ice. I left them sticking up so that they wouldn't refreeze to the glass. If the hinge freezes over night, i can just break that ice off to get the wipers back down. That's a lot easier than having to scrape around the rubber wiper blade and free that again.

After I was done, I noticed it had started raining again. The weather forecast says that it's gonna be 32 degrees through tomorrow so the ice might accumulate once again, but at least it won't build up on the inch of ice and sleet that was on there already. And at least I can get into my car now.

The best part of de-icing though was getting giant sheets of ice off and then breaking them on the driveway. Kinda sounds like breaking glass, but without the damage:)