Outdoor Power Equipment (Lawn Mowers, Snow Blowers, Chain Saws and more) Discussions

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpxQPPIKdy4

Yes, I've seen those snow melter trucks too.  It probably takes quite a lot of fuel to turn snow to water, but probably a lot less fuel than having an army of dump trucks to haul it away and empty coming back.

Snow removal isn't cheap.  Got to do what you got to do.  There's a lot of revenue lost if people can't get around.

Yep, I've seen these a bit further up North in the area where I used to live. They have to remove the snow because there won't be any where for the snow to go for the next storm. I think they also do this in Canada but I'm sure our neighbors to the North will chime in. Cool video, thanks for posting it.

Quiet afternoon here, so I did a little research. This appears to be an Athey forcefeed loader. Athey went bankrupt in 2001, and Leeboy purchased it; from the Leeboy site (leeboy.com) "While you may know the force feed loader by its Athey name, LeeBoy has greatly enhanced the loader’s design to excel at continuous high-capacity material loading since purchasing the Athey product in 2001." There's even a brochure: http://www.leeboy.com/uploadedFiles/10166_LB_Brochure_3000_FF_Loader.pdf Spec sheet says it'll do 20 cu yds (15 cu meters) per minute of windrowed snow. I say it's a bit too large for my driveway. Dang, it would have been fun.

Steve_Cebu wrote:
Yup, that's exactly correct up here in the Montreal area. In a regular winter they take it away after every snowfall. You'll also be happy to know that they stopped dumping it directly into the St. Lawrence river a few years ago. now they truck it to a designated area, where they re-blow it into small mountain size piles (depending on the amount of snow that falls) and wait for it to melt. Because of the cost of doing this, some will cities actually blow it onto your lawn instead of trucking it away. 

I had forgot the brand until you posted this. Yeah they were Athey branded. I worked around them back in the very early 90's. Bill_H wrote:

GtWtNorth wrote:

Montreal and Quebec City really know how to remove snow. They move the parking meters back to the edge of the buildings and really clean the streets. I used to live in Guild NH and they'd also dump it directly into a nearby river but stopped a long time back because of enviromental issues. I think now they move it into designated areas here as well. They can't blow it onto my lawn now tho. Up at the road it's all trees. LOL

The most impressive snow removal activity was in Nagano, Japan.  A bit overkill for amount of equipment they used, but impressive.

Here in Newfoundland, Canada we use many methods to remove snow.  One of them being Snow Dragon Melters.  Here is their website http://www.snowdragonmelters.com/

It takes about 80 cal to melt 1 gram of ice to form 1 gram of water. The same amount of energy will raise the water by 80C. I suspect that the environmental concerns for dumping snow in the local water shed are about the same as dumping melted snow in the same place ( possibly via storm sewer).

I got the following numbers from wikipedia

333 Kj/kg to melt ice
44  Mj/kg of gas

Doing the conversions

44 x 10^6 / 333 x 10^3  ~ 133 kg of snow per kg of gas.

If you assume a capacity of 10,000 kg of snow per dump truck and 5Km per kg of fuel then:

10,000 / 133 * 5 ~ 375 Km

So if you are trucking the snow to some place further than about 138 km ( truck has to get back to the loader) it makes more sense to melt it. If you are going somewhere closer trucking is better.

I am guessing at the dump truck capacities and fuel efficiencies, does anyone have better numbers.

I am also assuming you don't need to heat the newly made water above 0C before you dump it and let it run away on its own.

How many pounds of turkey fat does it take to melt 1 ton of snow?  :)  Almost forgot about the calorimetric calculation.

If you factor in hourly wages, plus union dues, plus liability insurance, and what not, the distance at which to haul away snow decreases quite a bit.