I’m ok in the morning, car is in the garage overnight. But on late shift this week, a scraper has been used, but only on the front screen.
If you do use warm water, make sure you dry your wiper blades with a cloth, otherwise as you drive away any water remaining on them can freeze solid making the now rigid wiper useless for the whole journey.
Back in the day it was possible to buy an aftermarket rear screen heating element as only luxury trim levels had one as standard ! For the rest ice scraper and leave engine running if safe to do so is my motto
Luke warm water although I do have those windscreen cover things and rarely remember to fit them. Retirement sounds the best option!
One car is 20 years old, the other 18.
Neither has rusted away………
Keep it in a garage 
Car has to be running.
Only if you leave the vehicle running on a road. Private driveway is ok.(Quitting).
If you stay with it, its fine, unless it makes excessive noise, then you commit a seperate Con and Use offence.
On a public road my understanding has been that you must be in it, possibly meaning in the driving seat, not just with it, so technically it would be illegal to start the engine and get out to do some scraping while the engine is running, though I have never researched this as a point of law, and I’d be very surprised if a policeman would even notice let alone take action.
As for the thread headline, if applied during freezing weather it smacks of the little Hitler mentality of some power crazed small minded enforcement officials.
The statute states " not attended by a person licensed to drive it".
Being outside the vehicle is fine.
Just not popping into a shop with car running on a yellow line outside, which is what the law was created to prohibit.
Heated front windscreen - best optional extra ever!
Also- if you have the fan on max defrost to the windscreen- pull down the sun visors- creates recirculating hot air and speeds up the whole process
In Kazakhstan in ‘94, we use to leave our vehicles running all night in the winter because at -30 and below it is really hard to get them started again once they’ve frozen😂
Yeah, at 5p a gallon you could do that.
I tell the geoff what time i plan to leave via it’s app and it sorts itself out… preheats the internal volume and defrosts front and rear via heated glass.
Thanks for clarifying
To be fair, this advice was given many years ago, when cars were not painted and rust-resistant as thoroughly as now.
My car is not quite as old - 16 years - and never sat inside a garage (I don’t have one, and if I did have one, it would be a workshop) and generally seems to be holding up OK
I thought the garage was for keeping all the empty hi-fi boxes and other bits and pieces of modern life.
I think most people I know think that as well.
Same. A saucepan of lukewarm water works a treat. I’m on my way in 30 seconds, while I see the neighbours scraping away for 10 minutes with their engines idling!
Can’t be many places left in the UK where you could do that and expect to find your vehicle still there when you came back out…
We were working for the Oil producer 