This is a follow on from the man who was complaining about the poor gritting and salting service we have here in Cornwall.
The weather is harsh , it was bad again last night where I am.
My drive and the lane are like a sheet of ice glass. I cant get a car out nor in. I have tried shifting it with a spade but its solid. I went looking for some salt or grit yesterday but none of the DIY stores in a 30 mile radius have any. All sold out. I even went to the supermarkets and tried to get some ordinary cooking salt but that was all gone too.
Is there anything else I can use to cut through the ice and stop it freezing again?
"whiskeyomega" wibbled on Thursday 24 December 2009 09:21
Walk round the neighbours, see who has a chimney producing smoke and ask for some old ash, by the bucket load. Coal ash is what you want - nice and gritty. It doesn't have to melt the ice, it'll grind into the top and make it go like sandpaper.
That's what I did to my drive and frankly it was better than sand.
Built some hardstanding a couple of years ago, where I used those (rather expensive) plastic "grid" slabs that allow grass to grow through them, for decorative effect.
Turns out they also have the unexpected benefit that up to nearly an inch of snow can freeze over them, but it remains in the grass holes and the plastic edges are still poking up between, leaving a useful walking surface.
Possibly a bit late now but I popped into my mates garage yesterday and he'd bought some rock salt from one of his car parts suppliers. I rang em and had a bag put on the next van (arrived 20 mins later). ;-)
Rain yesterday and freezing overnight made things much slippier than with just the snow. Luckily I popped into Wickes yesterday, and they still had some 25kg sacks of rocksalt, my drive and next door neighbour's now ice free :-)
Calcium Chloride also work but that's probably harder to get hold of than sodium chloride.
Don't you have salt in some form in the kitchen? We don't use salt on food and only add half a dozen grains to cooking occasionally (oh and the bread of course) but we have salt available both sea salt in the grinder and cheapo cooking salt.
You don't need much a sprinkling with three or four grains per square centimetre will do. All salt takes time to start to work and needs to be mixed with the slush to be really effective. Thats why gritting roads that don't have much traffic isn't much good, the traffic is needed to mix the salt into the ice/slush.
Max today of of 1.9C min -4.1C currently -0.4C, very fine snow has been about all day but no real fall. The vast majority of the 37cm (14 1/2") of snow that has fallen is still here, the drifts are up to
Try contacting your council and ask them to supply a road salt bin or two at strategic positions in the lane - and that will sort the problem.
It would even better if you elicited the support of your local councillor and any neighbours in the area to add a bit of weight to your request - and once the bins are in place, the council will keep them filled as necessary.
JOOI, are they legal there? Very much banned here (although the law varies from state to state), presumably because people try to drive with them when they don't need them and make a mess of the road surface...
True but so what. Even when I lived in Switzerland I didn't bother with snow chains, winter tyres, and the like. What's the point for a week or so a year, unless you live in parts of Wales, Scotland, Penines, etc.
Councils in some places should perhaps have bigger salt/grit budgets (and could usefully do more for pavements), but I see no point in spending gobs of dish on more snow-ploughs or gritters just so they can sit around idle for 50 weeks a year.
It's a problem here because mostly the temperature hovers near zero, just where ice/snow/water is dangerous. In places where the temps are much lower, cars driving along don't turn the snow into ice, and they
*need* winter tyres 5 or more months a year (so they have them).
Thinking along those lines as well - I keep seeing Snow Socks. They are a textile band that covers the tread and is supposed to improve grip. Some people are quite impressed; others dismiss them as rubbish. Any opinions?
Living at the top of a hill, with 3 or 4 out of the 5 access roads ungritted, I am most definitely interested in improving my chances of getting home - or getting away from home. Nine hours on Monday for just
12 miles from work. And I had to abandon car in carpark and walk up the hill.
A Hungarian I know asked me, he was told they were illegal at the car shop he tried to buy some from
Unless you have left your snow chains on top of your wardrobe in Milan and you can't get that last couple of hundred metres up to the top of the San Bernadino pass and have to pay some Swiss Bandit 50 francs to get you to the top
That is the point at which they would have been exceedingly useful
Studs will damage the road, chains will damage the road and quite likely to damage the tyre as well when driven on anything but snow at least a couple of inches deep.
But the chances of most people needing chains is minimal and you can only really use them when the road surface is well buried and being a bit of palva to put on and off in the cold not worth the effort. You also need to be sure that chain on the inside doesn't foul (and break) brake system or body work...
Might work.
Do you have winter tyres or general purpose/summer ones? Got winter tyres on my car and I drove it up a snow pack covered 1:7 the other day without a hint of loss of traction. Still slippy on ice but unless you have studs ice is just slippy. The summer tyres wouldn't pull it up a slight snow covered hill last winter.
Winter tyres have a reasonable block pattern but the real grip comes from the sipes, the small slits into face of the blocks. Some modern tyres have very few sipes and thus have very poor performance on snow. The rubber compound also remains softer at lower temperatures, winter tyres shouldn't be used when the ambient temp is over about
7C.
My summer tyres are noticeably "off" when in gets down towards freezing and have very few sipes, hence they are crap on snow.
"Snow tyres" actually M&S (Mud and Snow) are a legal requirement in just about every bit of Switzerland between November and May.
Snow chains take all of about 3 minutes each side to fit and are really very easy (once you've practiced in the garage on a warm day twice...) Use marigolds when fitting as the cold from wet hands is what is so debilitating - I can do one chain without gloves but if I manage to do the other chain I've generally cut chunks out of my hands by then and that really smarts once it warms up DAMHIKT
It is important to re-tension chains after a few wheel revolutions, and again after a few hundred metres, and certainly before giving them any welly as they'll likely snap and have your wing off and possibly the brake lines too if you are unlucky...
The snow socks are based on 'fluffy glove principle' (TM) you remember how your gloves would get bigger and bigger from making snowballs as the snow stuck to the fibres and then to that snow layer? that is how snow socks work, so in ice they are all but useless, and given that they are fairly delicate being little more than tyvek, then extended use off the snow will soon wreck them.
Snow chains incidentally are excellent as a Range Rover substitute in a muddy field when proper stuck, if you haven't cut too deep a rut to actually put them on... DAMHIKT
Neil (up a mountain in Switzerland until May :-) )
Got 'summer' tyres. :-( I felt I did quite well considering the scores of abandoned vehicles I passed. But the final hill would have been a challenge whatever tyres. About two hours were added by a coach parked at a jaunty angle across the road.
Sort of wish I had walked but lack of information about road conditions made it difficult to take sensible decisions. I kept getting traffic news from Chichester and next to nothing about Slough/High Wycombe which I actually needed to know. Seems all the radio stations use traffic news as a justification for existence but actually fail to deliver, but the RDS mechanisms don't exactly help.
Well if the manic wheel spin doesn't get you going you don't have a lot of choice...
Must admit I was quite impressed by driving up a snow covered 1:7, wasn't quick on the verge of stalling in 1st gear with foot pretty much on the floor at exactly help.
Most stations only carry traffic news in the rush hour periods and the only report that all the places that clog up, are clogged up. I've been stuck in a two hour tailback on the A1 south of Catterick at 2200 and not had a *single* traffic announcement about it for the entire time I was driving up from Leeds or stuck.
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