If Your Hand Sanitizer Freezes In Your Car You Should Throw It Away

One of the obvious changes that has happened during this pandemic is that everyone is packing masks and hand sanitizer everywhere they go. Some people are skipping basic hygiene tasks and even putting on pants every day, but we always have our sanitizer. We have bottle of hand sanitizer in all of our cars and whenever we load up after a trip to the store or from school we pass around the bottle so everyone has clean hands. The center console of our cars are loaded up with masks since that still seems to be a forgotten item pretty often.

We've learned a lot about hand sanitizer this year as I've had to constantly remind my kids that hand sanitizer is not a hand soap replacement, so they do still need to wash their hands. Most of us already knew that you shouldn't drink it and lighting a cigarette before the sanitizer dries is a bad idea, but for some it was a learning experience. We also learned that there are different types of sanitizer, after multiple brands were recalled this year because they contain methanol and are actually hazardous to humans. Now we have a new thing to aware of with hand sanitizer - if it freezes in your car you should throw it away.

Here's why, most hand sanitizers are alcohol based so they shouldn't freeze unless we drop below -50 degrees, according to Fox56 in Pennsylvania. Turns out that if it freezes you may be using watered down, and therefore less-effective, hand sanitizer. Since this is Idaho and we are not going to get near -50 degrees, frozen sanitizer is a dead giveaway that you need to get a different kind. It would be a shame if you were doing all the work to clean your hands to only find out that your basically just rinsing them with mildly alcoholic water.