Throughout these past few weeks in St. Louis, I’ve marveled at the state of a few driveways near where I live. The reason for my curiosity is that something is causing the snow to melt soon after a storm. I suspect there’s more to it than an industrious homeowner with a shovel and salt bag in hand, so I called Stephen Ryan, the service manager at Rhymes Heating and Cooling, to find out what else could be going on.
“They go by a lot of different names but, generally, they’re known as snow melt systems,” he tells me. Ryan’s company installed this type of system at Rosalita’s Cantina on Manchester Road, keeping the steps and sidewalks leading to the parking lot clear of snow and ice. “They don’t have to worry about sending people out there to shovel,” he says. “If you can keep from having people come out and throw salt down, and it’s a mess bringing stuff into your building and everything else like that, in the long term it could be worth it but we don’t get the kind of snow that people get in Colorado and those types of places.”
Get a weekly dose of home and style inspiration
Subscribe to the St. Louis Design+Home newsletter to explore the latest stories from the local interior design, fashion, and retail scene.
But for those who might appreciate clear walkways and sidewalks without the effort of shoveling, it’s important to plan well ahead of time because once the concrete on the driveway is poured, or the brick pavers on the patio are installed, it’s too late to install the mechanisms required to make the snow melt. That’s because the system works through a series of in-ground sensors that detect both temperature and moisture, triggering the boiler and circulating a glycol solution through plastic tubing that’s put in beneath a driveway, patio, or sidewalk.
If this sounds a bit over-the-top for St. Louis, where inches of snowfall aren’t always an annual occurrence, a less costly and labor-intensive option is the use of an outdoor heated mat, which plugs into a standard outlet. They can be placed on your front porch like a welcome mat, says Ryan. And if you need to cover more ground, such as along a wheelchair-accessible ramp or an outdoor patio, multiple mats can be stringed together to make a larger one. “You can buy an eight-foot-long section of it, or a couple of them, and you plug them in, back to back, and you’ve basically created a snow melt system above ground,” says Ryan.
