Many cities in Japan have sprinkler systems on roads to melt snow. They usually use groundwater which is warm enough to melt the snow without additional heating.
Although the cost isn’t really something municipalities who rarely get snow can afford, if you’re going to have lots of snow and don’t want the city grinding to a halt every couple of weeks, you do what Montreal does; physically remove the snow from the streets and dump it at designated dump sites.
Montreal uses giant snow blowers to load up dump trucks, which drive to specific locations (I know one is an unused rail yard, another is part of the ports) and dump the snow. The entire city gets cleaned up within about a week, with major arteries being clear 48 hours after a storm. We had a good dumping of snow on Wednesday; half our street got done last night, the other half gets done tonight - they split it because of on-street parking. If you leave your car parked on the side that’s going to get cleared, the city tows your car and leaves it on a side street somewhere, and fines you (I don’t know how much).
Then, when spring rolls around, the snow melts. After a heavy winter, the last bit of now very filthy snow tends to disappear by August or so!
Montreal budgetsabout $145 million a year to clear all of its boroughs.
Videoof the process, because it’s so damn cool!
Back when I was going to school at York University, (which would be in the later 90s,) after one huge blizzard I remember people saying that somebody in charge had ‘sent in the Army’ to deal with the snow. What the Army apparently had, for some reason, was big machines that would do all this - it would melt the piles of snow left by the plows and run the water down the storm drains in the street.
I don’t think I actually saw one of the melter machines, but I believe that I did see some of the snow piles suddenly vanish over the course of a day or so. And the explanation for why this wasn’t done every time it snowed was, yes, the cost of running the machine. But there was so much snow all over the place, even days after the blizzard, that it was a major problem for getting back to business as usual. (I think I even remember something about people whose cars had been plowed under who couldn’t dig them out because there was nowhere to dig out too.)
Well, they do, but not directly.
Most northern cities (like here in Minneapolis) have locations (empty lots, parkland, river flats, etc.) where they dump snow during the winter. Then when spring comes, it melts, and makes its way to the Mississippi River, eventually. But along the way it is filtered through the ground, creeks, lakes, wetlands, etc. so that it’s much cleaner by the time it actually gets into the river (or an aquifer). Also has the advantage that this takes a while, so the risk of flooding is reduced.
I’d have thought the price of sunglasses and cigarettes would be prohibitive right there.
OMG, that’s the old Rolls Royce Nene engine the Soviets reverse engineered for the Mig-15. It’s a 1940’s design.
A simple idea would be to vacuum up the snow into a trash compacting style truck which would squeeze it into water. pull up to a sewer and dump as needed.
Squeeze it into water? How? All you’d get is snowballs! I mean, unless you were using cosmic-style pressures or something, and you’d have to check the phase diagram of water to be sure.
Squeeze it with a hydraulic ram. Pressure = heat. It’s the reason turbochargers need intercoolers. You could also run the trucks exhaust through pipes around the chamber to ultilize scavenged heat.
So to summarize, you heat the snow in the process of sucking it up, compressing it, and heating it with engine heat.
Hell, let’s do a little more math. My small suburban town has 27,000 residents and 221 miles of street. The city doesn’t call out the plows until there’s at least 2" of snow already on the ground.
So, to melt the two inches of snow on the 221 miles of street takes approximately 35,360 gallons of gasoline. Assuming the city gets a break on the price of gas, and can get it for $2.50 a gallon, that works out to $88,400 per snowfall, or $3.27 per resident for a rather piddling snowfall.
Now this area averages about 20 inches of snow per year. Let’s say only half of that comes in snowfalls of more than 2 inches, leaving 10 inches per year that has to be plowed. Now we’re talking 166,800 gallons of gas to melt the snow, with a total cost of $417,000, or $15.44 per resident, per year.
Damn good thing I don’t live in Buffalo.
Suppose we used a 1920’s Style Death Ray to vaporize the snow?
And it could be used to eliminate flies and ants during a Summer picnic as well. In the Fall to get rid of fallen leaves. In the Spring to disappear noisy children that wake me from my afternoon nap.
Am I the only one who initially read this as sarcasm? I was all set to explain how ice is often more dangerous than snow, but now I think I was just reading wrong.
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And look, it’s been perfected. I knew today’s youth were more than a bunch of sexting slackers.
Why, when you could use the 1940’s Style Melt Ray?
I know im late to this discussion this is my first post too
NYC has 10,000 km of roads. If their all 2 lanes thats about 6m wide and lets say they get 1m of snow per year. I looked up the amount of roads, and their probably larger than 2 lanes and this also doesnt include any municipal parking lots or sidewalks etc. So 1m of snow is probably on the high side but its a reasonable assumption. I looked up the density of snow and it ranges from 100-800 kg/m^3. 100 makes the easiest math. 10,000,000 m of roads x 6m wide x 1m of snow= 60,000,000 m^3 of snow/yr. thats at least 6,000,000,000 kg of snow per yr and when you melt it it would still be the same weight in water. Latent heat of fusion for water is 334kj/kg so you need 2,004,000,000,000 kj to melt the snow or 2x10^15 j. Thats on the scale of the largest nuclear weapons. 1kWh is 3.6x10^6 j and in NYC electricity is just under 20¢/kWh your looking at costs on the order of $200,000,000 with 100% efficency. And this is also if the snow is already at 0C if its colder it will use more energy to raise the temp of the snow before changing it to water. With another measure a barrel of oil has around 6x10^9 j so you have to burn around 1,000,000 barrells of oil once again at 100% efficency so near $50,000,000 at current prices. NYC has a snow removal budget of ~$60,000,000. It would seem that burning oil would be a good idea(1,000,000 barrels is on the very low end of estimated) but in reality it would probably be well below 50% because you cant capture all the heat and oil prices are pretty low at this point not to mention sll the pollution.
Interesting…how did you melt it?
If you burn enough oil, you’ll reduce the need for clearing snow in the future, so it’s a win-win situation.
Markxxx was banned like a year or two ago so I doubt he’ll return to tell us the secret. Maybe this will tell you everything you need to know about melting snow, though.
Wouldn’t you also have to worry about floods?
IIRC, the melter referenced in the video was supposed to dump the meltwater down the storm sewer. Even in the dead of winter, many of these will be open; pipes are deep enough to never freeze (imagine the damage if they did - pipes wouldn’t unplug until May, and all April the city would flood from melt and rain).
The logic was that many snow dumps in the Toronto area were getting to be tens of miles out of town, in crappy stop-and-go traffic, so the cost of hauling a dumptruck load of snow too far was comparable to the cost of melting it. A place like Ottawa might be small enough the fuel calculation goes the other way, cheaper to haul to the outskirts.
The EPA rules are not as stupid as they sound. If you dump a huge load of road snow directly into a river, it breaks through any ice and there is a huge amount of road salt, car exhaust and leaking oil, and garbage, all dumped into the water at once. A giant snow dump that melts over 3 months in spring will trickle that pollution in slowly, diluted by rainwater and added to the river’s water in small stages as it flows by. Garbage and sand likely remains behind at the site for cleanup after the melt.
For the same reason, the snow melters, if used as a major means of snow clearance, risk sending dollops of polluted water into the local river. Probably for that reason they are not recommended.