We’re all so used to worrying about falling snow, it's easy to forget about melting snow.
Melting snow is good, right? It means all that slippery, slushy white stuff is going away.
But where is it going? And can it get there? And what is it doing along the way?
Interesting questions.
Lucky for you, we have answers.
You want your property’s melting snow to flow into your drains, not in front of your entrances or across sidewalks.
So, it makes sense to pile your snow right over the drains, where it can happily melt, right?
Nope.
Here in the mid-Atlantic, we might get three feet of snow one day, then it's 60 degrees the next. The next day it could plummet back down to 12 degrees.
So….
If snow piles are positioned over your drains, all that melting water can easily freeze, icing over and blocking your drains.
Commercial water management 101: water belongs in drains.
If drains are blocked, water from melting snow has to go somewhere else, like beneath sidewalks, where it can cause a lot of damage by freezing and thawing.
We’re sure you have better things to do than stare at those rivers of melting snow on your property. But we keep a pretty close eye on them.
They tell us things — like if you have drainage problems we should fix in the spring.
If you have an ice skating rink on your turf, or pools of water by your entrance, or sidewalks heaving and cracking, chances are you have drainage problems.
If crews put too much salt on your property — and that’s an industry-wide problem — melting snow carries that salt right onto your plants. That can kill them.
That’s another reason to make sure melting snow has a clear path straight to your drains, so it bypasses your green friends.
You may have heard about the harmful effects of salt on the environment. It makes its way into area lakes and streams, jeopardizing the creatures who live there.
That’s why we love brine. It’s job is to prevent ice — but it’s a commercial water management hero.
Brine is a liquid mixture of water and salt that’s sprayed on roads, parking lots and walkways, usually before a snow or ice storm to prevent snow and ice from sticking.
Brine uses one quarter of the amount of salt as traditional rock salt, so it’s gentler to the environment.
One truckload of brine equals four truckloads of salt. So we can treat a larger area with less salt per square foot.
We do a lot of training on winter weather issues with our snow removal crews, including how not to waste salt by applying it when the temperatures are so cold it won’t actually work.
And when we apply snow melt product, we keep it on hard surfaces so the chemicals don’t damage your turf.
We don’t apply excess — just the amount needed to melt the ice.
How will they know where the drains are?
A pre-season walkthrough with your snow removal contractor — before the snow falls — ensures they’ll know exactly where to put piles of snow for proper drainage — are where not to put them.
After the walk-through, we’ll create a sitemap of your property that includes lots of helpful information for our crews, including where to safely pile the snow.
It’s important for your snow removal contractor to know what they’re doing, so your snow doesn’t end up in the wrong place. Commercial water management means dealing with snow, too.
Here’s where it’s handy to have a landscaping company do your snow removal.
We love plants. It’s our job to install them and take care of them, year round. The last thing we want to do is kill them with salt.
If a roofing contractor or concrete company does your snow removal, they might not think twice about pushing a big pile of snow onto your shrub hedge.
It’s not that they hate plants. They just don’t think about them the way we do.
If we take care of your commercial property year-round, our crews really get to know your property, including the locations of all your plant life and your drains.
Make sure your snow piles are exactly where they should be.
Level Green Landscaping provides customized snow removal and ice management services to our clients that we already service throughout the year.
If you’re not already a Level Green Landscaping client, we’d love to add you to our growing list of happy customers.
Our focus is on commercial properties like offices, mixed-use sites, HOAs, municipalities and institutions in Maryland, Washington DC and parts of Virginia.
Contact us at 202-544-0968.
You can also request a free consultation online to meet with us one-on-one.
We’d love to hear from you — before the snow piles up.