Snow and Human Ingenuity

Snow and human ingenuity

It is snowing right now outside of my house. And it seems every year it snows and I have ideas on how to handle snow.

I mean, seriously folks, is the shovel and snow-thrower the best things we can come up with as a species?

Well, the way I see it – there is a lot of room for improvement.

In some ways, dealing with snow on your driveway, sidewalk and perhaps even your deck is something people do on an annual basis. Depending on the region of the world you live in, of course.

One way we have of dealing with snow is not dealing with it at all – and living in a region of the world where snow just does not happen.

Collecting everyone in the world in these regions seems unlikely. People like my wife believe they can never handle the heat produced in areas like Miami.

So, I imagine we will always have a portion of the population willingly or not that has to deal with snow at least part of the year.

Another way of dealing with the snow – would be to architect the way we live so that snow has a minimal impact on daily life. The idea of The “Ultima” Tower http://www.tdrinc.com/ultima.html certainly brings to mind the fact that people living as part of a large community where there are no roads – only a 2-mile high building – filled with offices, apartments, malls, and entertainment – would have little to fear from snow or inclement weather.

I have my own idea – similar to The “Ultima” Tower – which I will have to flesh out one of these days – which is certainly much smaller than TUT (The Ultima Tower) yet would bring many similar benefits.

I have also been to cities where large building are connected together by underground hallways, malls, and subway systems (Chicago, Montreal) that clearly people who live in an apartment building near a subway station, work in one of the business buildings in downtown and shop at the mall – would have no need to go outside and experience first hand inclement weather.

Now, I know, many of you who are young are thinking – I have no fear of the weather. Certainly I am not old enough that I have a healthy fear of it either. But I do have knowledge. Knowledge that every year Mother Nature takes human lives the old fashioned way – exposure. Perhaps it is exposure to the snow – while shoveling it away from your driveway (heart attacks), or exposure to ice on the roads in a car (or hey even on foot), or even just plain it is cold outside and you are trying to get healthy by going for a jog in the morning (heart attacks again, probably some strokes).

Yet a third way of dealing with the snow is through invention. This is really what gets to me. I always have ideas on how to deal with things, but rarely do I ever truly proceed with them and make them a reality.

Consider that many people that own homes own what is called a leaf blower. These leaf blowers always brag about how fast the wind is blowing out of the blower. And people often call snow-throwers, snow-blowers. So, it seems a simple idea to actually use a blower to deal with snow. I tried this, and on a small scale, with an appropriate type of snow, it works. I used a leaf blower to remove all the snow from my deck from a snow-storm earlier this year. The snow was light and fluffy. It was not a heavy wet snow. There was only a small accumulation – of about 2 to 3 inches. The deck was nice and dry underneath the snow and I did not have ice on it on the succeeding days after the snow – which my greyhound was grateful.

The fact of the matter is that I exerted myself much less than using a shovel or a broom to clear the snow from my deck.

It becomes painfully clear though, that a leaf blower would be insufficient to any heavy accumulation (such as I am having now in New Jersey) or to particular types of snow which are heavy and wet.

The idea I had last year for the leaf blower – was not to just use a leaf blower on the snow. It was to use a heating coil, some PCV tubing and a leaf blower in combination to create a very hot wind to blow the snow away as well as melt it quickly.

The idea would be to create a “chamber”of PCV tubing that would loop around in circles. This tubing would replace some of the leaf blowers exhaust pipe. Then envision this looping tubing cut in half vertically, and insert a coil of heating coil threaded through it. Then put the loops of tubing back together. Attach it on one end to the leaf blower and on the other end to the normal exit for the air to exit and interact with snow.

This is not a very complex idea. Make a concentrated flow of fast moving air (much like a jet engine – without the jet fuel J ) and point it at the snow. A lot of the snow will move away from your target area – and this is ok – it is certainly part of your main goal – and some of the snow will melt which will also in a way remove it from your target area.

There is one problem with this idea. And that is that the air coming out of the exhaust needs to be hot enough to melt the snow and it needs to be hot enough to heat the surface and quickly evaporate any moisture left on the ground. You see, there is the risk that in quickly melting the snow, you simply create a new danger – water on a cold surface with lots of cold air around – creating a thin sheet of ice. So the proper way of removing snow with this device is to not only melt the snow, but dry the surface (the driveway, deck wood or sidewalk).

Another invention for home use to get rid of the snow is what I call the “hot” shovel. This isn’t a terribly complex idea either. You take something that looks a lot like a shovel except that it is a bit thicker and has two hoses leading from it to a backpack. The backpack is a source of heat – that heats water – which then circulates hot water through the spade part of the shovel.

This helps out in a couple of ways – it should keep the user warm (hopefully, not too warm) and makes the blade of the shovel very hot. You then use the shovel more like a plow than a shovel. You just kind of push it against the snow – and it should be sufficiently hot enough to melt the snow almost immediately.

There are of course, theoretical draw-backs to such a device. It might be heavy – even if it is an electrical element heating the water and a wire for the power source – so you are not carrying fuel nor the engine for generating heat – it will still be heavy.

It faces a similar problem to the blower. Since we are melting the snow to remove it, instead of physically moving it – this will cause the ground to become wet, which it probably wasn’t with just the snow on top of it. Unfortunately, the “hot shovel” will not have a means for drying the ground surface. But hey, at least the snow will no longer be there.

Some offices already use the method I am about to describe. My wife once worked for a pharmaceutical company – and they had a long stretch of sideway between two buildings that was frequently traveled. The problem is that employees would often injure themselves traveling between the buildings. The employees could not reduce traffic between the buildings because sometimes facilities were located in one building and not another – and they needed to use those facilities.

So, what they did is they ran hot water pipes through the ground underneath the sidewalk. Effectively, so never accumulated on that sideway – and ice never formed on it. This, indeed is great. But unfortunately, I suspect that it is far beyond economical for the typical homeowner to undertake. Not that I have not pondered the idea of running some hot-water pipe under my deck so my greyhound would never worry about slipping on the ramp on the way down to the back yard. Unfortunately, I think this kind of system creates a lot of wasted energy – especially since you would need to drain all the water out of the pipes to turn it off (unlike the pharmaceutical company, I would not run mine 24 hours a day) and I would like to turn it on to keep it clear during snow storms or to keep ice from forming overnight after rain in the winter and keep it off most of the time after that.

Well, I suppose that is enough about snow. Since it is unlikely that I will get off my fat ass and actually implement one of my inventions – and unlikely that I will spend the money routing hot-water pipes under my deck and newly done driveway and sidewalk and it is probably even unlikely that I will thresh out my idea of a large multi-community ‘home’ structure – I will have to live with my snow-thrower, snow shovel and broom to clear the snow. And I will have to hope that I do not develop the kinds of heart problems typical of Americans as they get older and suffer a heart attack one day while clearing the snow.

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