Edmonton's Snow

[jon]

Calgary has been hit at least twice this year with a nasty snow dump. This morning was Edmonton's turn.

Here is a city traffic camera "problem":


If it looks like a shot of the Rocky Mountains, that's what I thought, too, at first. Then I realized it is just snow piled up on the camera lens.

[freqfreak2]

One of the drawbacks of replacing bulb-type traffic signals with LEDs is that the green lights don't generate any heat to melt snow.

http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/17/led-traffic-lights-dont-melt-snow-do-cause-accidents/

[jon]

Do you think we'll see traffic lights with those cute little windshield wipers that Volvos used to have on their headlights?

[MIKE FM]

radio wise, 91.7 the Bounce was just an open carrier when i tuned in this morning before 8 AM. They came back to air claiming "problems at the transmitter" - where their engineer Trevor was.

[Jack Bennest]

Warm and sunny here - pineapples startting to ripen.

[Russ_Byth]

Terwillegar?

[Mike Cleaver]

And people still ask me why I left Edmonton after putting in 7 years there.
Maybe it was getting up at 4am when it was -40 and seeing the electric bill skyrocket with two block heaters and two in car warmers going 24/7 plus two gas furnaces roaring away in the house.

[jon]

Thankfully, things have improved since the good old days to which Mike refers. When I first arrived here in 1975, it was rear wheel drive and bias ply tires. Not a good combination. That part, at least, had improved by the time Mike had left, though we were still driving carburetor-based engines, which really are not a good match for Edmonton winters.

Today, a "standard" house built in the last 10 years has really good insulation and windows, with even the cheapest gas furnace using almost half the natural gas of its predecessor, excluding the benefits of the much better insulation. Plus, with the disappearance of alleys, garages are attached to the house. If you were smart, you insulated your garage, plus installed gyproc and had it painted, including the ceiling. And have a well insulated garage door. If so, it rarely gets below -10C in there, even on the coldest mornings, so there is no need to use a block heater or in-car warmer. Even the snow melts off thanks to the residual heat of the car engine when you parked it the night before. Edmonton has a policy of not using salt, just sand and pebbles on the streets, so corrosion is not normally an issue.

Buy yourself a set of all season radials that perform well on ice, and you have it made, assuming you have a front-wheel drive vehicle with decent clearance.

But there is one remaining problem: the traffic jams created by drivers who insist on running all winter on their summer performance radials on their luxury sports cars.