I hate shoveling snow!

I don’t know how you guys that get lots of snow do it.
We were hit with a record 14" of snow and I have been working on and off all day to shovel my drive off so I might actually escape the house.

It is hard work!

Our usual 1"-6" snows don’t bother me and I can drive right over them without cleaning the drive, but this time the snow had drifted anywhere from 14" to 24"+.

Ok, enough complaining, back to shoveling…  :-\

Meet IGOR the snowblower…

We might actually get a couple inches this evening. Which is bad because it will shut down the city.

I’ve had to shovel snow when I lived overseas. PITA for sure.  ;D

We have no driveway  :smiley:

Help is on the way:

Eh…Suck it up Sally!!I  ;D grew up in the snow belt, on Lake Erie. I’m 33, and my dad just got his first snowblower. Guess he figured with me in Idaho, it was time!

Heh, heh, heh…

I leave this as a possible solution.

http://alum.mit.edu/pages/sliceofmit/2011/02/02/1948-mayor-to-mit-use-flamethrowers-to-melt-snow/

Living here on the coast of massachusetts we have been getting a one to two  snowstorm once a week since christmas with four to eight predicted for saturday It seems all I do is shovel and being on the coast it has the consistency of cement.  I keep reading news reports of roof collapses and I keep looking at all the snow on my roof.

Me too. I bought a 7.5HP Craftsman 24" snowblower several years ago and it rocks!

The hell with all that shoveling. Blowing is where it’s at.  ;)  8)

It wasn’t so much the 8" of standing snow (I can drive over that) as much as the 2’+ drift blocking the garage… (Central OK for anyone interested).

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I mostly don’t bother shoveling because we never get enough snow, but if we got a lot I would shovel my roof . . . I saw some good videos of roofs collapsing today. :o

The storm that hit us this week took me about 4 hours to clear my driveway. And that was with a snowblower. The drifts were chest-deep. I couldn’t see my 5-year old behind them. It’s kind of funny around here… The first couple snowfalls of the year, I enjoy breaking out the snowblower even when it’s only a couple inches. Then once we hit January and February, unless it’s over 3-4 inches of snow, nobody bothers anymore. "Eh, the cars will compact it enough and it will melt eventually.

I’m surprised the MIT folks haven’t come up with some sort of forcefield to put over the Greater Boston area that prevents the snow from ever landing on the ground.

I have a snow blower for the driveway and path to the utilities.  Boy I can tell you the neighbors love me when I’m out there are 5:30am so I can get the driveway slear for my wife to go to work!!!

Here in Des Moines (or there-abouts) we had a 2’ drift across the drive that was 25’ wide and 50’ long.  The snow blower was even starting to choke on it because it was packed so tight (40 to 50 mph gust for 24 hours).  My drive took about 45 minutes.  2 hours after that I had all the new, young neighbors, who didn’t have a clue what to do with the 4’ of snowplow drift at the end of the drive, dug out.

Luckily it was a balmy -5F at the time.  Gawd, I love Iowa!  :wink:

Paul

I was in Aspen about 12 years ago - they had heated sidewalks in part of the town, very nice for walking.  If you get your driveway redone it’s something to think about :slight_smile:

Oh trust me, I’ve looked in to it. Problem is the cheap installation (electric) will send the meter spinning so hard it will disintegrate or, if you do a geothermal system you will spend a lot of money on the installation. Either way you can pay someone to plow you out for decades for that money.

Hot water pipes?

I just prefer my method - stay home until the snow goes away.  Usually within a day in my area, but sometimes it takes 3 days. :slight_smile:

I think it was about 0.25" that we got last night. It’s enough to freak out the clueless. I’m sure the ER’s are full of MVC’s.

A heated driveway seems like it would be really cool.  Unfortunately there are issues that are more serious than cost to operate.  With 2 feet of packed snow and sub-zero temps, it would take a very long time to melt off the drive.  Once it was melted off, there wouldn’t be anywhere for the water to go and it would just freeze in the street.

Downtown Des Moines put in some heated sidewalks last year.  If I understand things correctly, they still need to clean the big layers of snow off but the heaters keep them from icing up.  It makes them safer but doesn’t, necessarily, mean no shoveling.  It was also used as a campaign attack during the 2010 elections.  ‘Insert name of sitting councilman’ voted to spend your tax dollars on heated sidewalks.  Can you trust someone willing to WASTE YOUR TAX DOLLARS in that way?   8)

I like the force field over the city idea.  Flame throwers would be fun too.

Paul