Or rather, clearing the sidewalk of snow with a flamethrower?
There are a number of businesses by me that haven’t shovelled the snow and its been stomped into ice and is quite treacherous. Removing it by hand or chisel would be pretty involved, but would there be any ill effects to using a flamethrower, like cracking the sidewalk?
How long would it take to clear say a 3’x3’ foot section completely?
A military-style flamethrower would probably take too long to clear a sidewalk.
Plus, they use jellied gasoline as fuel… Which tends to stick to stuff and burn for a while (as the old song goes, “napalm sticks to kids.”)
You’d want something more like this.
The propane burners put out about 15 million BTUs each… And because they use propane as fuel, they’re no remaining burning mess (except for the collateral damage.)
But then you end up with a puddle surrounded by snow. How do you get rid of the water now? It won’t be as deep as the snow was (1:8) but come nightfall it’ll freeze into a sheet of ice.
Remember that, to be effective, you will need to boil the ice/water, not just melt it. Otherwise you’ll end up with the same problem, just less visible.
Hit it with the heat long enough and you won’t have to deal with the water either.
The flame thrower is particularly effective in getting rid of snow and ice that build up around the garage door.
Just make sure the kids are out of the house before you have a go at it.
This was the result when a friend of my brother’s built a backpack propane torch as a random project. He melted all the snow in his parents’ dirt driveway, and a few hours later they were trapped, as the tire tracks had frozen into rock-hard, hatchet-sharp blades of mud. 
Well according to this Wikipedia article on flamethrowers:
Some collectors of military hardware claim to use them to clear the ice off their driveway in the winter.
WAG Have at it. A flame thrower would be hazardous to use, slow to clear and dry the sidewalk and consume a lot of fuel.
Better option would be some good deicer compound. Make the ice safer sooner, and residue helps to melt new snows.
When working at Home Depot alot of people bought a propane torch we sold for this purpose. I don’t recomend a military flame thrower shooting plasma goo and leaving singe marks everywhere might anoy the neighbors.
I don’t know how effective it is on snow and ice, but I have often fantasized about using a flamethrower to clean my desk at work. (Just as soon as I get my new all asbestos cubicle!)
Yeah, another disadvantage would be wear on your sidewalk. Taking an ice cold cement sidewalk and suddenly hitting it with a very high temp flamethrower can’t be good for the cement. I expect it would start to crack pretty quickly, and by spring you’d see it crumbling away. Then the City comes by, digs out the old cement and replaces it, and assesses the cost to you.
Shoveling would be a lot cheaper. Even running a snow blower would probably use much less fuel than your flamethrower. So it’s a pretty inefficient way to do this.
P.S. Where are you located? Most cities have ordinances requiring that sidewalks be shoveled within a specified time. If they don’t, you can report them to the City, and they will notify them that they have to clear their sidewalks. If they don’t do so, the city can send out a crew of government workers to do it, and add the bill for that crew to their property taxes. I’d check for something similar in your city.
If it’s asphalt underneath, it could be quite a bad thing.
The biggest disadvantage would be sudden, agonizing death in the event of malfunction.
Something that rarely happens when your snowshovel breaks.
Yes, I know about heart attacks, but that’s you breaking, not the shovel.
Wouldn’t it be way cheaper just to dump a bunch of salt on it?
Here’s what you are looking for (right-hand pic).
‘Course it might be a bit of overkill for the 3’x3’ peice of sidewalk, but it’d do the trick, and I’m guessing that it would only take a minute!
It’s not as dramatic, but you could just build heating elements into the sidewalk and run electricity through it when the snow falls. Then you don’t have to stand outside playing that flamethrower all over the snow and ce for long periods of time, creating crack-inducing hot spots and risking injury. They use these heated sidewalks in a lot of pl;aces, and they work pretty well.
Slow and steady wins the race. Nowhere near as cool, though.
The flamethrower was idle speculation. Calling the city would get the same reaction that I get for things like, drug dealers, people breaking into cars and nesting brids attacking passersby (out of illegaly maintained trees no less), namely, “why don’t you just walk to work/home another way?”
I have a driveway that slopes down to the street. I always wondered about hooking up the hose to the kitchen sink and spraying fresh fallen snow with hot-hot water. I know it would take a while to blast through and melt ice but fresh snow should go down pretty quickly.
