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"+.
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!
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.
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!
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
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.
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.