As the wiper blades on my Astra H estate are getting noisier, I made some enquiries regarding replacements. They seemed to vary from around £30 a pair to the £41 asked by my local vauxhall main dealer - a bit steep, I thought, for a couple of glorified strips of rubber.

I came across 'ALCA super-flat wiper blades' on e-bay for £16.99 a pair, and wonder if anyone has any experience of them - I'd never heard of them before. Do they do the job, are they easy to fit etc? Any comments will be gratefully received.

Cheers Waino

Parts like like this are usually cheap and on e-bay for a very good reason, leave them where they are. Visibilty is very important especially this time of year and even £41 is not that much for something that lasted 5 years on my last car, spend that much every time I visit the pumps.

I have bought 180° branded blades from ebay for years from this seller, and have always found them to be as good as BOSCH Aerotwin at 1/4 of the price. In fact I suspect they are made in the same Chinese factory, as they are identical except for the BOSCH legend and 4x inflated price tag..

Sadly, they don't sell them for my current car and I bought two sets frome bay, the first were fabulous at £8 delivered OE quality but were 22" instead of 23"+24". the next were £22 and utter rubbish in every way so I returned them. In the end I got genuine ones which thankfully were on speacial offer at about £22 a pair.

Edited by Hamsafar on 03/01/2012 at 15:29