I live in Nova Scotia Canada. Our winter’s always have snow. I know this. I know that the snow is coming every year, and I still dread it. I dread that I never know when the snow will come – snow doesn’t have regular office hours. It could snow any day, any night, any day of the week. Snow’s like the honey badger, it don’t care.
Most of our apartments are four-plexes targeted for seniors, where each unit has their own parking space and front door. One of our biggest rental features is that we include snow removal and lawn care. This is attractive to people looking to downsize from their homes and for people who just don’t want to do any more snow removal or lawn care. That’s where we come in, we shovel the driveways. We mow the lawns. However this means we have about 30 driveways to plow and 15 lawns to mow.
Snow Removal Equipment:
Now, we’re not going at the snow removal completely by hand, and I am definitely not doing this by myself. We have a 35 HP Kubota tractor with snow blower on the rear and box blade on the front, 3 walk-behind snow blowers, a handful of shovels and about four-five people to work all the equipment.
Biggest Issue with Snow Removal:
Every single storm is different. For example:
Storm 1:
The first storm we had of the year was about 10 cm of snow, light and fluffy. Easy to shovel, and the wind blew all the snow to one side of the road. It was simple to clear everyone out.
Storm 2:
The second storm, on Dec 26th, Boxing Day, was about 15 cm of snow, it started off light and fluffy. Then it started to melt and it became heavy. Plus in this storm the wind blew all the snow to the other side of the road. And it was -20 C out.
Storm 3:
It snowed about 5 cm of snow, then warmed up to +2 C, just enough for the snow to melt. Then it dropped to -7C in about 3 hours, letting everything freeze solid.
Storm 4:
About 10 cm of snow came down before it switched to freezing rain which knocked the power out. This was the outage I talked about in this piece.
Storm 5:
We had about 2 cm of freezing rain. Luckily we didn’t need to shovel, just had to salt everything.
Then last weekend it went up to +10 C rained and melted all the snow.
Storm 6:
Today.
Last night’s forecast was for 10-15 cm of snow. We got that much by about 7 pm, and it looked like it was letting up. I went to bed expecting a straightforward snow removal plan this morning.
Wrong!
An extra 10-15 cm of snow fell last night. We had to clear about 25-30 cm of snow from the driveway, plus all the snow that got piled up by the street plow. Today that felt like there was 50 cm of snow at the end of each driveway.
What I expected for us to take about 2 hours to do, took about 4. Well, that’s mainly because the belt broke on one of our walk behind snow blowers, a bearing broke on the 2nd snow blower and the tire blew on the 3rd . We were down ALL the snow blowers. If you drove down our street today you’d have to avoid the abandoned snow blowers sitting on the side of the road.
Even with the extra snow and the broken equipment we got everyone cleared out and the driveways looked good. This storm was just so different than the last five and I just know the next one will be different than this storm.
Why I am writing this?
Today I offer no insight or guidance into snow removal. My approach will be different than what you need, and the next storm will be different than this one.
I am writing this to solely to share my experiences. I want everyone else out there that’s struggling with snow removal to know that you are not alone. We are all in this together, and we can do it. Spring is not that far away. We can make it. Together!
Plus it’s supposed to go to +7 C this weekend.