# Removing ice and snow from long driveway

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/removing-ice-and-snow-from-long-driveway/829492>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [February 13, 2019, 7:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/removing-ice-and-snow-from-long-driveway/829492 "2019-02-13T19:32:11Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![Johnny\_L.A](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnny_l.a/32/1084_2.png) [@Johnny\_L.A](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_L.A)\
**Post date:** [February 14, 2019, 2:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/removing-ice-and-snow-from-long-driveway/829492/21 "2019-02-14T14:30:53Z")

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The mail truck has given us a miss the past few days. I think the snow in front of the mailbox deters the carrier. I didn’t bother doing anything about it, because the truck has chains and had no trouble on Monday. But I’m tired of seeing _other_ people (the ones on the more-travelled street, and with all of their mailboxes in a bunch) getting their mail; so I drove the Jeep round and round and back and forth to mash down the snow in front of the house.

I shovelled the front 20 feet of the driveway, and continued about eight feet into the street. I shovelled out the Prius. All that snow I mashed down with the Jeep? I shovelled 20 or 30 feet of that to make _sure_ the mail [del]lazy[/del] lady can get to the mail box. (Having been compacted, much of it came up in nice slabs, leaving dry asphalt underneath.) I had about 4 pounds of ice melt, so I sprinkled that over the part of the driveway I cleared. (I wish I could have found a 50 lb. bag of rock salt!) I haven’t been out to check it this morning, as the sun won’t rise for another hour. By the look of the street yesterday afternoon, it will be a skating rink. While I did move the Prius into the driveway so that I could clear the snow from the sides of where it was parked, there’s no way I was going to attempt to put it on the ice. Not without someone around to help push me back into the driveway.

The weather-dot-com hourly forecast says temperatures will be above freezing by noon, and we should start getting rain by 16:00, that will continue as ‘rain’, ‘light rain’, ‘few showers’, and 'showers, for the following 34 hours. I suspect the rain would have done all or most of the work for me; but I wanted to clear the critical areas so that I wouldn’t have to shovel them when they have wet snow.

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