Although with the snow in the mountains, I can just sweep the driveway as long as my neighbor hasn't salted it like he's a sumo wrestler and the driveway is the most important tourney of his life.
I noticed that a lot of people seem to do that. Throw salt like it's going out of style. The problem with that is all it does is melt the snow, and then when it re-freezes you get a layer of ice with snow on top. Not good for cars or people. I shovel his sidewalk quite a bit when I have time, just to keep him from throwing salt on top of snow. I shovel my other neighbor's walk as well, but that's just because she's in her 90's and doesn't need to be running a shovel up and down the sidewalk. Not if I can help it, anyways.
Also, if you have to throw salt, a mix of salt and sand does wonders for your tires gripping. Some of you Southern people will have no clue what I'm talking about. Some of you Northern people are going to wonder why I use a shovel when there's snowblowers and plows available. It ain't that serious.
Battery powered leaf blower. I got one for the ramp in front of the hangar doors. That cut my time from 30 minutes of shoveling and a big berm to push jets through to about 10 minutes of whirring and a nice easy transition. Dry snow, when compared to the heavy ass wet lake effect crap I grew up with, is magical.
ReplyDeleteI've had to shovel wet snow in plenty of areas. Compared to Wisconsin, Utah is a breeze. Like I said, I can literally sweep the snow as long as there's not a layer of salty slush underneath.
ReplyDeleteThat doesn't stop people from driving like absolute morons, salty slush or no. I wanted to pull people out of their cars and beat them with tire irons today.
We used to carry a garbage bag full of pea gravel in the trunk of the car, both to provide rear wheel ballast, and to use for traction... toss a few handfuls as needed... might be worth looking into...
ReplyDeleteTubes of sand. When I had a truck, I'd go buy a couple tubes of sand from Home Depot. They're 70 pounds each, so three of them laid across the rear axle gave me plenty of weight.
ReplyDeleteWith the vehicles we have now, I doubt it would do much good, just because they're as good of vehicles for bad roads as we could get. But we keep a bucket of sand/salt mix in the garage and toss it as needed. Which apparently is 10% of the usage our neighbors throw.