Saturday, January 29, 2011

Never Shovel the Snow Again

I love the snow, I love to ski, I love snowballs, I love sledding, I love the blanket of clean white purity it looks like, I love it.  However, I hate, hate, hate to shovel.  And so I've spent a lot of time thinking about how I could engineer my driveway so I would never have to shovel again.  The answer: a geothermal heat exchange system.

Currently heat exchange systems are in use in a couple of ways.  For our purposes it's a network of pipes that are buried roughly six feet under ground.  At a six foot depth the temperature underground stays between 45-75 F no matter the season or location.  You put that to work by running air through the pipes.  As the air passes through it would reach a temperature around 55 and then travel up to a similar set of pipes buried just under your driveway.  This way the hot air helps heat the driveway keeping snowflakes melted as they hit the ground.  In a heavy snow you would still have the advantage of it working 24/7.  So when a storm hits at night even with buildup your driveway would be clear in the morning because the exchange system had all night to do its work.

Or a robotic snow blower, that would work too.

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