Tom Ramcigam (magicmarmot) wrote,
Tom Ramcigam
magicmarmot

I hate shoveling snow. It's not good exercise (full of stressing impulse, not consistently aerobic, etc.) and it's a general pain in the ass. I keep thinking I should consider getting a snowblower, but for the small bit of actual snow removal that I have to do, it doesn't really counter the expense and storage/maintenance requirements that it would entail.

Well, there is a bit of wonk attached to that. A few years ago, one of the neighbors moved and was in the process of discarding their non-working snowblower. It is now down in the Basement of Doom awaiting resurrection, one of those projects that I'll Get Around To Someday. It's really not very big or very powerful: it's smaller than my lawnmower. And I really don't know what's wrong with it other than it doesn't work. It's not really possible that I'd get it working this winter (because it's likely that the engine is hosed), but I have thought about stripping the gas engine off of it, getting a powerful electric motor from Ax-Man, and mounting the motor on the frame to power the thing.

Meh. Probably not worth the effort. I'd probably be better served by designing and building my own super snow melter, but instead of using propane, power it with Strontium-90. No exhaust, no recharging, quiet. So it's a little radioactive: so's your smoke alarm.

Practical considerations. It takes a hell of a lot more energy to melt a given amount of snow than it does to move it from one location to another (see latent heat of fusion), so a snow mover is more energy-efficient than a snow melter, damn and blast.

Well, this might be overkill.

Or for those who like chainsaws...

Yeah, okay, this is all very fun and distracting, but none of it actually shovels the snow. Besides, the little dog loves the "shovel snow on me" game, but she'd not really like the whole snowblower noise.

But this noise could be more annoying.

Thank ghod I'm not emo.
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