These labour-saving devices really ease the job of spreading salt and grit onto paths, walkways, drives or car parks, helping you and others walk freely around home or workplace.
Salt spreaders come in two styles – ones you push and ones you tow – and in a variety of capacities.
Generally the wheels are large and have deep treads, to allow for better manoeuvrability, and rust resistance is highly prized as salt is nasty corrosive stuff.
Usefully, a lot of these spreaders are designed for year-round use. Salt or some other kind of ice melter in winter, then fertiliser or grass seed during other parts of the calendar when gardening is possible.
But what if you have no choice, or want to ensure you’re covered against the possibility of getting caught out in a sudden change of conditions?
The trick is to not treat your journey like a jaunt down the local shops (even if that’s all it is) and to make preparations that will cover you if things don’t go as planned.
You might only have a five-minute trip in mind, but poor conditions or accidents could force you into a longer journey in both time and distance, or even out of the car altogether. Leaving home in your shirt sleeves with a car running on fumes could easily come back to haunt you.
There are some essentials that we’re going to figure you don’t need our help in assembling. Just raid your cupboards. These include:
Basic checks on your car include making sure you have more than enough fuel – a road closure might mean you get diverted around a longer route – and jump leads in case of a flat battery.
More complicated items include a first aid kit, a small shovel, chains for your tyres if the conditions are going to be really wretched and – strange though it sounds – cat litter as a way of dealing with wheel spin on slippery ground. You can also buy full breakdown kits with a collection of items in.
In some countries, these are compulsory. In the UK they fall under the heading of equipment that you won’t need very often – but, when you do, you’ll find very useful indeed.
These shovels aren’t the sort you could use on a building project – far too small – but keep one in the boot of your car and you’ll be well-set to dig yourself out of trouble.
In recent years, stories about how councils have almost run out of rock salt have become as much a traditional part of winter television news as reports of motorway chaos and frozen railway lines.
So what’s a householder to do, given that pinching it out of the council’s grit bins is illegal?
Here are some links to suppliers who sell rock salt online – ranging in quantity from single bags for your home, to bulk deals suitable for commercial or community buildings.
]]>Spades are cutting tools, designed to dig into the earth, so they’re not very efficient at scooping up loose material. And even if you also own a shovel, the comparatively small head will make clearing large areas of snow a long, slow job.
As with so many tasks, using the right tool makes the work a great deal easier. A specialist snow shovel is economically priced and has a head roughly twice the size of a builders’ shovel, meaning you can cover ground a lot quicker.
One thing it won’t do, though, is fit easily into the boot of your car.
It’s common sense that you need some kind of digging tool if you’re planning to drive any sort of distance in the snow – especially if you’re not in an urban area. Fortunately, a wide range of folding shovels are available. Some are designed specially for motorists, others are for more general use or are Army kit.
And then there are tools for digging yourself out of avalanches. But let’s not go there.
Designed for your home or business, more efficient than gardening tools and cheaper than a snow blower (but harder on the back, too).
Small folding shovels you can tuck away in the boot and forget about, until the time you need one.
Designed for skiers at risk of avalanches, you’ll probably never need one of these – but if you ever do, you’ll really need it.
]]>Your average Brit can’t shake the feeling that it’s cheating to let a machine take the strain – they’d rather toil away heroically all day with a shovel, only to see their work covered up by another snow storm half an hour later.
But using a snow blower makes a lot of sense if you have a large area to cover – a corner property with a lot of frontage, perhaps, or a long drive. And if you suffer from backache at the best of times, or if you’ve been warned not to put your heart under too much strain, doing it the hard way is unquestionably a bad idea.
It’s in circumstances such as these that a snow blower comes into its own.
Of course, you’ll have to make a judgement call about whether you get enough snow in your area to make the cost worthwhile but, if it is, you’ll find a variety of sizes of machine available – from household size to ones big enough to tackle a commercial premises.
Most snow blowers have little in common with the hand-held leaf blowers that their name resembles. Instead, they’re more like lawn mowers. Some are self-propelled and some require pushing – but all are a lot less trouble than a shovel!