Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/12/30/man-cleans-snow-off-driveway-with-flamethrower.html
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Now he has a driveway covered in nice clean black ice!
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Lobs in a couple of grenades… just to make sure.
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Appropriate.
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Not to be a party pooper on the city slicker hyperbole or anything, but this is not a “flamethrower”. It’s a tiger torch, commonly used in construction, mining, fabrication, foundry work, and other disciplines. It’s just a big propane torch, basically.
This is a creative use of one, though a bit expensive on gas just to save 20 minutes of shoveling.
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Trump: It’s freezing outside, where the hell is “global warming”??
Neighbor dressed as Cousin Eddie: Hold my beer.
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So, speaking as someone who has lived his entire snow-shoveling adult years in the subtropics: wouldn’t this cause the snow to melt and re-freeze into ice on the driveway? Isn’t that a bad thing?
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A good physics/biology test question would be to calculate the relative energy efficiency of this method versus shoveling. To make it fair, you have to include the full energy input for the production distribution and percent wastage of the food that fuels the shoveling. Even with those adjustments, I’m guessing it’s at least 100 to 1…but that’s just a guess.
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Eh, if you cook off enough it shouldn’t be that bad.
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That looks a bit more extreme than the propane weed burner I used. I had a thing that was more like a propane torch on a long pole, used for roofing tar or to turn the weeds in your sidewalk into easy to sweep cinders.
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Yep; as noted above, you’d almost certainly make a near-perfect sheet of “black ice”, unless temperatures are already above freezing:
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Isn’t it “Gentleman”?
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I can see the desire to indicate that an a post contains a video, but why put “VIDEO” in ALL CAPS? Oh, right, clickbait.
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Water takes a hell of a lot of energy to change phase. I’d like to see this melt just a couple of feet of regular snow on the driveway.
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I’ve wanted to do this to hard, packed-down ice on the sidewalk that’s impossible to pry up (not snow, that’s just lazy) and which the city is always incredibly eager to issue a fine for. My sister pointed out, as others have here, that it would just re-freeze into black ice. At this point I’m not sure what else would help short of a jackhammer (other than shoveling snow at 1 in the morning before it has a chance to get trampled down, of course).
Amateur. I knew a fella at mile-high Lake Arrowhead in Southern California who had electric heating elements embedded in the asphalt of his sloping driveway. Driving home, he would hit the remote control, and by the time he reached his driveway, it was clear of snow. Are we seeing here the hillbilly version?
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This is a not-uncommon option in Canada as well. A few people on our street have heated driveways.
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Rational.
Easy solution: more fossil fuel. Boil that water away. /s
But on such a sloping driveway, starting at the top and working down, I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the water drained away before freezing. Snow melting into water at high noon, then refreezing at night, is not at all uncommon and most of the time doesn’t turn into black ice.
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