Asphalt Driveway Snow Melt: Planning to Completion

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for coming to our webinar for April. This month is going to be all about asphalt driveways and snow melting. We're going to go from planning to completion.

I am Mary from WarmlyYours. I am the sales manager. I've been here for 20 years, so I have a lot of residential and commercial experience in snow melting. I'm an expert problem solver, and I will be your advocate along the way. Joining me today is Scott.

Hello, everybody, and thanks for joining us. I appreciate you coming along. I've been at WarmlyYours for almost 18 years now, and we have a lot of information to share with you today, so make sure that you stick with us. To go over a couple of quick housekeeping topics, we're going to do a Q&A panel at the end.

If you have any questions, please feel free to type them in or hang on to those topics. We will be sending you recorded sessions and resources after the webinar is over, and you will also receive a rewards coupon for joining us today that will be sent to you by our owner, Julia Bilski.

We're going to discuss the advantages of having asphalt driveways. Today we're going to talk about what we do with zoning controls, the kind of sensors you need, and some common mistakes and troubleshooting. Along with that, we're going to speak about maintenance, and Scott's going to tell us why electric is the preferred method over hydronic when you're talking about asphalt. It's so easy to do; we take all that guesswork out for you. Asphalt and concrete are two different things.

Obviously, when you're working with asphalt, you're working with high temperatures—temperatures that will melt PEX tubing, but will not melt our cables. That's something you have to consider. Our cable is designed to withstand these very hot temperatures. Also, one of the benefits of electricity is that there are no boilers, no pumps, and no valves.

You don't have to worry about leakage or glycol getting into your yard. There is a big difference between asphalt and cement, and

So you're going to be getting our mats at 50 watts per square foot on your SmartPlan. It's going to highlight all of that information for you for your voltage, your watts, and your amperage. So no guessing here. What else do we have to think about? Well, I can tell you one thing.

We had a phone call today already from someone who didn't bother to get a plan, and now they have too much material, they think. So, you know, no matter The best thing to do is to get us your dimensions first. We can get you a SmartPlan, and then you can get the correct product ordered the first time, because now we spent half an hour with this person and, and, um, still up in the air as to what they're going to do. And it's just because it wasn't planned for in advance. So if you just give us a sketch, we can make sure you get the right, the right stuff and put it in the right place.

Um, also, one thing you need to keep in mind is this product is usually 50 watts per square foot. The SmartPlan will tell you if we— we have a picture of a SmartPlan right here, but if we take a look at the bottom, you can see the breakers that are required. We can see what the total amperage is and what products are being installed here. We can see where the junction boxes go here. We can see where the product starts because that's where the triangles are.

So all this is designed for these 20-foot cold leads to get into that junction box. That's why you don't start some of them over here. You don't start some of them over here. You start them all as close to the junction box as you can get, because that way it allows you to get all those leads in there. So this is what a SmartPlan gets you.

It gets you all this information that you need, and it tells you what size breakers, all that information that you can give to your electrician when they're getting ready to do that. So not only is it that sort of planning with, with electricity, which is a very, very important thing, and if you have no open breakers in your breaker panel, if you have no broke open spots in your breaker panel, probably not gonna be a good match for electric because you've gotta have open breaker spots. You also need to worry about your drainage and your slope. Your installer's going to get your slope correct, but you're going to need to worry about the drainage on the sides of it so the water goes, has somewhere to go. That's gonna allow you to manage the runoff edges because most people in their driveways, the melting snow turns to water, obviously, at least where I come from, and that water is going to go off the side of the driveways into your yard.

Well, you need to make sure that that doesn't go into a trough, you know, that it goes somewhere and it can, it can go and melt and stay melted. So those are the kind of things that you need to think about. Also, you need to think about the climate-specific engineering because we don't all live in the same spot, right, Mary? That's right. So, for example, we use the ASHRAE regional data This kind of tells us a little about the localized snowfall, wind speeds, and we kind of factor that into the system.

So, by our geo-targeting, we can kind of then precisely get the requirements of what wattage you would need for each zip code area. Somewhere here in the Midwest, you might need more than you would somewhere maybe in the Southeast or somewhere. Right here, versus over there, maybe we're at 50 watts a square foot here and somewhere else we may be at like 38 watts per square foot if they are just more of a wet to slushy kind of climate. Some, something like in Washington State, even they get a lot of rain, but they don't want that rain to freeze over. So if we take a quick look at this map, you can see some areas where 50 watts per square foot isn't quite enough.

And these would be special, special, jobs that would have to be quoted. But for the, the main part of the United States, 50 watts per square foot is, is more than plenty. And some of these areas with lower watt densities, what you can do is you can go down to a 4-inch spacing of the wire instead of 3-inch spacing. So if you are in Montana, you are not going to necessarily need— you're going to need a little more power per square foot than you're going to need down here in Utah. [Speaker:KIM] Right.

[Speaker:ROB] So that's something to keep in mind. So you don't need 50 watts per square foot like you do in Montana. You can get by with 23. So it just goes to show you that wherever you live, different areas require different amounts of power. So that's what we keep in mind when we do that because not every job needs 50 watts per square foot.

So if you don't use 50 watts per square foot, you save on watts per square foot, which is going to save you on electricity per square foot, which is going to mean less money for power, and it's going to mean less money for cables because you don't need as much metal. You know, cable's made of metal. You don't need as much of that copper or nichrome, whatever it's made of, in your specific driveway. So that's one thing that's going to affect your upfront costs and your operating costs. Very good.

Thank you, Scott.

So the coverage strategies we have are for the amperage limits are the full coverage approach, the tire tracks approach, and a hybrid approach. When you're talking about full coverage, that's everybody's desire. Of course, nobody ever wants to shovel anything. This is heating the entire surface. This is really fine for smaller driveways or homes that are, you know, maybe new construction, or you're able to bring in a dedicated panel just for those full coverage big projects.

Most of the time, and a lot of times, we'll have clients that will give us a tire tracks option for those very long driveways. A tire tracks option is great because we have mats that come in 2-foot-wide widths and 3-foot-wide widths, which will align with your wheelbase of your vehicles. And this drastically reduces the power requirements that you're going to need. It will reduce the amps draw. So that we can have a faster melting path for you to get in and out safely.

And then there's also the hybrid approach, which is sometimes the best of both worlds, where you get a little bit of the tire tracks getting yourself into the driveway. Maybe we'll do full coverage near the top for parking or sometimes down at the apron before the street. So if you're on an incline, you don't go sliding out into traffic when you come out of your driveway. And there are even jobs where they don't heat anything except the last 30 feet of the driveway. Because they've got a hill going down and they get to a street.

They want to be able to stop in their driveway before they get to the street. So they don't heat the whole thing because they usually are in a mountain area or whatever. They've got a 2-mile-long driveway, but they want that last 30 or 60 feet to be somewhere where they can stop. So that's even beyond the hybrid approach. But I can tell you from my personal experience, if you've never done this before and Mary will tell you this, is that when we talk to people for the first time that have never done one of these jobs, They say, I want to heat every square inch of my driveway.

And then we give them a plan. And that plan goes, you're going to need 600 amps to do that. Okay. So it's not— if you have anything beyond a normal driveway, whatever that is, you are probably going to need to think about doing tire tracks or heating the 12 feet out from the doorway at your garage, heating that completely and then tire tracks out. So the thing that— what we get the question all the time is, well, how much power does it really use?

So most of the time, the jobs will get quoted at 50 watts per square foot. So that's 50 watts per square foot, usually in 240 volts. So you take that 50 watts, you multiply it times the number of square feet that you have, and that'll give you a number. Then you take that number and you divide it by 240, which is the voltage, and that'll tell you the number of amps. Very, very simple.

Watts per square foot times the square footage covered, then divide that by 240. That will tell you how many amps you're going to need. So here's one of our case studies. We can show you a very excellent project we did here in Killdeer. This project optimized a TreyaTrax option.

This was a very long driveway. Outside of the Chicago suburbs. And in this— oops, um, on this driveway system, they did just the tire tracks. Oops, almost. And sorry, I didn't know it was going to open the window that way.

I apologize. Um, it will just do a tire tracks option here. And you can see in this driveway, we're going to show you— it's a very large driveway. So, um, for this client, we just covered the one portion where it was a little bit more steep section coming into the driveway on that side. There you can see they have taken it down to the first aggregate layer, right?

Mhm. That's the crushed rock. And then we can show you a little bit deeper picture of that. There you go. And here they're coming through with the first binder coat that's going down first.

So they need a binder before— you don't just put the heating cables directly on that rocky aggregate. And we can tell we're working on the binder coat because we see the paver machine. Oh yeah, the paving machine is never used for the second coat, it's only used for the first coat. So as soon as you see this, this paving machine driving over this area, you know that's the first coat. Okay, good.

Oh, and there's yours truly cutting the cable to fit. Um, I'm not cutting the cable to fit, I'm cutting the mesh to fit. You can never, ever cut the heating cable. And here we can see what the final layout is. Now, if we take a look at this, we can see where here's a roll, here is a roll, then there is a roll, and there is a roll.

They all start from the same place. Why would you start all four of these rolls or mats in the same place? That allows us to get the power over into this conduit. That's very important because you don't want a conduit over here, one over there, and another back here—you want them all in the same place, and you're going to see that in the future. So here we can see where the binder coat has already been put down, and we're now rolling out the cable as we go.

This is a recurring theme with these installations: you don't need wheelbarrows to carry this all over the place. All you need to do is use a skip loader to dump the asphalt on top and then hand-work it over the top. So you're literally not tracking this all in. Here you can see where we're getting the first non-heating lead, or cold lead, ready for the conduit. And here's where our other one is.

We can now see that we're covering this up as we go along. Here we are, kind of going back in time. You can see where the product has been laid over, and now it is going to be rolled over once they get it hand-shaped and put into place. And then there's our conduit. All those non-heating leads are running into here.

The heating wire never goes in the conduit. This is the non-heating lead—that's what that black wire is that goes in there. And that's that part of the job. I would like to point out that conduit is pretty important to have prepped in there prior— yes, that has to be done ahead of time.

Your electrician is going to be doing that way in advance. A couple of days even before the asphalt guys are there, they need to make sure that the junction box location is placed. Then they need to make sure that their conduit runs from that junction box to where it's supposed to be. The electrician needs to see this plan because here's where the junction box is located on the drawing, here's where the conduit has to go, and here are the amps and the circuit breakers and all that

So let's take a look at this section in action, shall we? Yes.

So you can see now that the area is, um, has already melted from the first round. This is going to be a second round of snow, and it's coming down, and you will see if the snow comes down really, really hard that you can see that it will— it can't keep up with it. But the thing is, it eventually does keep up with it. Here you can see it's getting covered because the snow's really coming down. And now you just give it a little time, and it was about 8 to 10 inches of snow during this event.

You can see now after the, after the time, you can see where that has uncovered itself. So that is the section of— that's the product in action. So that is, um, very important to keep in mind that that's how that product works. Awesome. It's so cool to see that melting, isn't it?

Yes, that's—. All your neighbors will be so jealous of you. All right. Okay, um, and our next case study is one in Manoa, New Jersey. This is a large-scale hybrid approach.

So what we're talking about again is that tire tracks going in, and then we've got a large shovel-free parking area at the other end of the driveway. So this driveway was 12,000 or 1,230 square feet. It was going to be too much to do all at once just because this square footage, if you did that math problem we just gave you earlier, you will know that. So the solution was using a zone breaker control. Tell us about the zone breaker a little bit.

That's going to break it up, right? Right. When you have a large, let's say you have 80 amps available in that's it, and you have a job that's, um, 200 amps, you can split it into 80-amp sections. So it'll, it'll allow you to do that. So the idea here is to do it all in one section.

That's the best approach because that's the fastest. But if you have 160 amps of the entire area, you only have 80 amps available, then you're going to do one section have it heat, turn off, have the other section heat, turn off, heat, turn off, heat, turn off. So they're never on at the same time. That means that you're not going to be blowing your breakers. Okay, so you are going to be zone 1, turn off, and, and that's going to rotate continuously.

And sometimes you, you're going to do a zone like every 8, 8 minutes, every 20 minutes, whatever your particular job requires. Some people set it for an hour, but then it takes another hour for it to come back. So the best thing that we see often is to do a short span, like 8 minutes, 8 minutes, 8 minutes, 8 minutes. That way it's only without power for 16 minutes. So you can see that you can do more.

And we also have a question from Mike. And I'm sorry, Mike, I tried to make this print a little bit bigger before, but it didn't—. I think he's asking for if we have to insulate under the cable. Well, first of all, this is electric. So electric is not like hot water.

Hot water, the answer is always yes, you need to put insulation under it because as soon as the water leaves the boiler, it starts cooling off, right? And it even cools off before it even gets out to the driveway. So then once it hits the driveway, at the very beginning, that where the water comes into the driveway, that water is going to be much hotter than the water where it leaves the driveway. So that's why you need insulation, because you need to make sure that you've completely isolated that from— oh, I better answer this slide. So that's why with electric, you'd have to check with your code official, but we don't recommend it because you don't need it.

Because the wire at the very beginning is the same temperature that the wire is at the very end. You don't have to worry about temperature drop. So hopefully that answers your question. With hot water, yes, you need insulation. With electric, you don't.

Yeah, electric's just so hot and fast, I think, too. Just, yeah, really efficient. Yeah. So let's take a look at the shovel-free, um, uh, mawa installation here. And you can see here that we have done, um, a hybrid.

We've melted the area in front of the driveway where they're going to be backing out, backing around, and then driving out the drive. So we've heated this pretty much most of it. And then we have, um, tire tracks going up the drive up to the street. And here you can see that they are working on it. And these are the cold leads that are coming out here in one place.

Um, and that's what's important when you're laying this out. You're not doing it haphazardly. You're trying to get these cold leads, um, in a certain area. So here's going to be a junction box up here, and here's going to be a junction box right here. So you're not putting a junction box on the other side.

Yeah, and you're kind of seeing that those mats are like lead to lead, like beginning to beginning, butted towards each other so that you have the two leads come in at the same time versus all your leads at the one end. Exactly. Lead wires are only about 20 foot long on those heating mats, so junction boxes are going to be required. Yeah, and you're, uh, you're not going to be doing any extensions of the cold lead. We get that question all the time.

Can I extend my cold leads? Well, all your cold leads are designed to do is get to travel 20 feet into a junction box. Then your electrician is going to supply you power from your breaker through the relay panel out to that junction box. He's going to supply all that, he or she, and the cold leads are simply getting into that box. And here, as you can see, our control.

So this is a zone controller, I can tell you that right now. And there are 1, 2, 3, 4 zones. So the relay panel will, uh, this control will turn this relay panel on and all the wires hooked up to it will heat up. Then it will turn it off and for 1 second it'll stay off and then it'll kick this relay in and then this relay will then kick all those wires on and it will just rotate 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, and it just goes round and around and around. I had a guy ask me the other day, Scott, if those relay panels can be mounted outdoors.

Relay panels cannot go outdoors. They're NEMA 1 boxes, and they are designed to be indoors. Indoors only. Very good to know. Okay, Mary, I, uh, having trouble reading this.

Yeah, this one is again from Mike. I think he says he was, um, referring to the reduced— maybe amp rating cost, maybe not so much of the heat loss. By using an insulation? Would that give him a better operating cost? It might, but you'd have to check with your local code official because our product needs to be embedded with cementitious or asphalt for 1, 2 inches below.

So that means it has to be in— so if you have 2 inches of cement, the cable, then another inch and a half at least on top. He's going to have— or the code official is going to have to say whether you can let rest that cable on insulation. As opposed to cement. So, um, all of our cross-sections— and our sales rep will be glad to talk to you about that, Mike— is that we don't recommend and we don't require insulation on any of our jobs. Yeah.

Okay, so, um, if you've done hot water in the past, that's where you're getting— that's where a lot of people get the insulation question, uh, because, hey, we did this in hot water with concrete, do we need to do the same thing with asphalt? And the answer is no. So hopefully that answers that question for you. And I'm going to get out of here. We can take a look at that and go back to our presentation.

So that's, that's the large-scale hybrid. So we did tire tracks, full coverage and a zone controller. So that's kind of all the bits and pieces put together. And the reason why it was 231 amps. Yeah, a lot of homes only have about a 200-amp service.

For the whole house, for the whole house. Yeah, especially if you haven't upgraded your panels, uh, or service in years, which we get that call a lot. I get— someone says all the time, oh, I have 200 amps. Well, the whole system takes 200 amps sometimes. Yeah.

And here's a close-up of those controls that we use for our asphalt projects. Asphalt does always require what we call a high limit or OT sensor, over temperature, overheating sensor. This sensor comes with the premium control. This is really the best option to go with for your asphalt project. It's the one we're going to default to every time to quote you with.

So you're going to get the Premium Control most of the time unless you have an amperage limit, which we will then quote the zone breaker. But you'll have to tell us, or your electrician will have to tell us about, you know, what's the load capacity that you can pull at one constant load at a time, right? Now, the Premium Control originally came up with— the thing with asphalt is it's different than— remember we talked about asphalt being different than concrete? Concrete doesn't melt if it gets really, really hot in the summertime and the system goes on by mistake, which I've never heard of. But in the old days, I guess it used to happen.

I've been doing this for almost 20 years. This overtemperature sensor acts as a safety and it does a couple of things. Whenever it gets up to 80 degrees—or whatever you set that little knob to—it won't go over 50, 60, or 70. It keeps the product from accidentally turning on and melting your asphalt into goop.

That's where a lot of that came from. Now, with electrical code requirements in places like New York, Vermont, and Colorado, the control must have a sensor in the slab to turn it off if it ever gets over 50 or 60 degrees, or whatever that number is. So, not only are we doing it for "old school" protection so your asphalt doesn't turn to Jell-O, we're also doing it because many states require it by code. If you're in the state of New York and you're going to get inspected, even for concrete, you're going to need one of these two controls because it needs to monitor the slab temperature all the time.

That's very important. We're going to talk about the difference between a snow event and after-run. A snow event is when the snow is actively falling and the temperature is below 38 degrees. If you meet those two criteria, the system will kick on. If it's 50 degrees and snowing, it's not going to turn on.

If it's 12 or 25 degrees and it's not snowing, it won't turn on. You've got to meet both of those conditions. When those conditions are hit, the system will be in a "snow event." Now, the system doesn't just stop after the snow stops or after the temperature goes above 38 degrees.

It then goes into the after-run, which melts the rest of the snow and evaporates the water so you don't have black ice. We're going to have a little quiz at the end, but the people who don't set the after-run for a long enough time are the ones left with slush.

People will call us and say, "My system melted the snow, but I can't get rid of the slush," or "I've got black ice left behind." The reason is that the after-run period wasn't long enough. That is adjustable on both of these controls. If you find yourself wishing it would run for two more hours every time, then set it for two more hours. That's the secret. Now, let's talk about the placement of sensors.

This is very important because we want to make sure your system detects precipitation as well as the temperature. Sometimes a sensor is placed in a poor location, like underneath eaves or overhangs, which blocks falling precipitation from hitting the sensor. You can see the one with the little snowflake; that's the actual sensor. Where that snowflake looks engraved, it's actually two different contactors.

When it gets wet, it activates. The number one problem we see with these aerial sensors is when they're placed right next to the house because the owner says, "I don't want to see the sensor." They'd rather not see the sensor than have the system work.

That's backwards because you've gone to all this trouble to install the system. You have to put the sensor where it's going to see the snow. We call that "snow shadow." Don't put it under a tree or directly next to the house.

When people are planning next year's jobs and talking about getting an aerial sensor, the first thing I tell them is to go out after it snows and see which parts of the yard or house have no snow. Depending on where you are, there might not be any snow within two or three feet of the side of the house. If there's never any snow there, don't put your sensor in that spot because no snow is getting to it.

That's the main thing. This is a very abridged version of the video, but when it comes to aerial sensors, you can go to the video section of our website to see the full version. Let's take a look at how the sensor is installed. It should be tilted slightly, about 15 degrees.

This allows the excess water to drain off. You also want to make sure you have a long enough tube here. If you glue this onto the tube, all these connections must be waterproof. If you ever have to replace the sensor, you'll need to cut the tube. If the tube isn't long enough, you won't be able to fit your cutter in there to replace it.

Always make sure you have some extra space. Also, make sure you're using a waterproof box with a waterproof seal. We want all the internal connections to stay dry. One of the main problems we see with sensors "quitting" is that they are actually still working, but the connections inside got wet. I'm going to stop the video right here because it's primarily over.

A lot of people want to put this sensor over in the bushes. If you put it at a certain height in the bushes, the snow might hit it this year, but bushes grow. Eventually, that sensor gets buried underneath them.

Please don't put them in the bushes or under trees. This spot here is very good because that's where the snow falls. That's what we mean by snow sensor placement.

Here is a great diagram of a cross-section showing how to layer your heating mat. It starts with compacted gravel. We show a 4 to 12-inch span for the gravel. Why such a big difference? Well, 90% of the time it's going to be 4 to 8 inches. We showed two different amounts because I wanted to discuss the differences.

If you have a very good subsoil area with good drainage, you can get by with 4 to 8 inches. But if you're in a wet area, like that house in Kildare we saw, they actually put in about 12 inches of compacted gravel. Your asphalt contractor might say, "Well, WarmlyYours only says 4 to 8," but really it's 4 to 12 or maybe even more.

Don't get hung up on that number; it's just an idea for an average job, and some jobs aren't average. Some are commercial. I had a commercial client who was parking garbage trucks and dumpsters, and he definitely had a heavier gravel base. After your gravel base, you have your binder or base coat.

This is the 2 to 3-inch layer you saw in the earlier video. Once that first layer is down, you'll lay out your heating mats. This is the dry-fitting stage. Just like in the video, make sure you're laying out the start ends correctly so they're in line with your junction boxes. Secure those down so you can hand-shovel the asphalt over them. We get this question all the time: "I just want to do a 3-inch layer."

Can you do that over gravel? Can you lay the heaters on the gravel and do 3 inches over the top? No. Another one we get all the time is: "Can I use just gravel? Can I put a layer of gravel down, then the product, then more gravel on top?"

Not by code. Code says you have to have something hard and resilient over the top, not gravel, which eventually gullies. That's very important. We get that question all the time, but you cannot use a gravel driveway and heat it.

We want to stress the need for precaution. Obviously, we don't want you driving over the heating cables while dry-fitting them. Make sure the UPS driver doesn't come through to deliver a package while you have those laid out. It would ruin the entire installation, so definitely stay aware of your surroundings.

They can go over it with roller machines once the top coat is done; they just can't drive over the exposed cables. You can see right there where they're starting closest to the house and working their way out. You can see that a little bit better in this picture. Let's take a look at this, because a lot of asphalt contractors who have never done this before say, "I don't want to use wheelbarrows."

They don't want their guys scooping and running wheelbarrows back and forth. But once they see this video, they'll see you don't need wheelbarrows. You can use a skid steer and simply roll out the product as it's being covered. That way, you can drive on the binder coat without touching the cables. Then they cover the cables, you drive a bit further and dump, and it looks just like this.

They're just dumping the asphalt with a skid steer over the top, then machining it or installing it by hand. There's no heavy machinery going over the cable itself. They're simply dumping the asphalt and then raking it by hand. When you're using rakes, make sure you tape the ends because a rake can damage a cable. You have to be very careful.

We don't want to gouge the jacket of the cable. Regarding conduit details, I mentioned how important it is to get the splices and start leads in the right spot. On our mats, those are only 20 feet long, so placement is important. The factory splice does not go through the conduit.

That section still heats and cools, so you want that splice protected by the asphalt. It has to stick out from the conduit at least 4 inches into the asphalt. If it's inside the conduit and gets really hot, it'll overheat and fail. Plus, it's against code.

You can literally damage your cable that way by blowing the end of it. As we said earlier, the conduit installation must be done ahead of time by the electrician so you can pull those lead wires through and keep going with the installation. All your junction boxes should be installed before the asphalt crew even shows up.

All your conduit should be cut and bent before they arrive. Once the asphalt guys are there, they do everything in one delivery. They'll lay down the binder coat and roll it, and that's your window to lay the product out so it can be covered. All of your conduit has to be ready to go during that stage.

They aren't going to sit around and wait a couple of hours for someone to install conduit. It has to be ready to go.

Transition sections are also very important to consider when you are butting up from the concrete in your city sidewalk to the asphalt section of your driveway, or maybe your concrete sidewalk that goes to the walkway of your house. You've got to plan around that, and routing out those cables carefully is something you need to consider ahead of time, especially if you're not replacing the concrete. You're going to go around it somehow, right? You're never going to be running electric heating cable...

Sometimes people have a concrete apron in front of their garage. You're never going to run cable in there and then run it into asphalt. You're simply heating the concrete section first, then you're using a separate cable or a separate roll to do the asphalt. When you're doing asphalt, we always say to use the rolls, not cable.

Mats for sure. They're much easier when they're pre-fashioned together in a mat. And faster—the secret is speed. Absolutely.

And then we have the most important part as far as Scott is concerned: the testing of the heating cables. Testing is very important. This is not just your typical ohmmeter; this is a megaohmmeter. This is going to test for the resistance of the cables.

This is required. You need to take those readings before, during, and after your project begins. What a megaohmmeter does is send down 500 volts. It'll send that down like here—you see, you've got a red, a black, and a ground, which is yellow and green.

It sends voltage down the red and the green to see if the insulation between those wires is intact. If that insulation is intact, the 500 volts will never pass from one to the other. However, if it gets nicked and there is a problem with the wire insulation, it'll sneak through there and give you a reading. This one is good; it's "OL," which is overflow, which means that nothing's happening.

Then you're going to do the next thing: go from black to ground and see if that insulation is good.

So you need to watch out for that. And one of my first jobs that I did here is somebody took a rake and they weren't careful and they went like this to help move the asphalt and they put that rake right through the wire. And the person with the mega ohmmeter said, stop right there, whatever you did. So we stopped everything. And what we did is we marked out that area where we thought it was, where the guy just hit it.

We marked out like 2 or 3 feet all around with a square or a circle. Doesn't matter. And what you do is you, you keep going. So you, you do the asphalt and the rest of the driveway, you leave that area open. Because the next day we came back, we fixed it, and then the next day they came back and put asphalt there and ran over it again.

So that's very, very important. If you nick the wire, you don't need to stop everything. You just need to dam off that area and proceed. Right, very good. There is one big thing that we want to point out here is the GFCI protection.

This stands for ground fault equipment protection breakers. This is mandatory on snow melting. This is not your basic GFCI little 5 milliamp trip. This is a bigger protection breaker, and it is required by code for, for snow melting projects. Yeah, and what happens if— I know as soon as somebody calls up and goes, my, my system is tripping, is tripping the breaker all the time.

Well, my first question is always, do you have a GFCI in there? Yeah, there's a GFCI in there. Is that what it's supposed to be? And I go, nope. It's supposed to be a GFE-P because if you have— let's say that this cable that always tripped your breaker has 20 milliamps of leakage, which is almost nothing, but still it's something, right?

So if you have 20 milliamps of leakage on this wire, without going down the rabbit hole, it will trip a GFCI breaker and it will never work because it'll always keep tripping it. But if you're using a GFE-P breaker, which is 30 milliamp, it won't. Right. That's why it's equipment protection. And that little bit of extra between 5 milliamps to 30 gives you that buffer of the system working versus tripping the breaker all the time.

So that's something that you really have to keep in mind. And what's the main problem with GFCI breakers, Mary? We don't provide them and they're expensive. Yes.

So yeah, please get those sourced out by your electricians and plan ahead. And we will point out to you on your SmartPlan how many breakers you should be looking for and what size breakers. Those need to be. It'll tell you right on the SmartPlan. Definitely get your SmartPlan.

We take all that guesswork out. Okay, so after you now have your driveway in and it's still summertime, is it time to turn it on in the middle of summer? Nope. You get your ohm readings first of all, are going to tell you whether it's good or bad, right? You don't need to worry about that.

And when also summertime comes along or the following summer after your first couple of years of using it and you want to go to some seal coating over your snow melting system, The whole system must remain off during that time of the curing. Yeah, because, you know, like, you know, there are always temperature requirements. If you want your driveway covered with this stuff, it can't be below 50 degrees. You know, it's got a bunch of rules that come along with it. This is just another rule that happens to do with that question we got from Jack— Jake.

Yeah, it looks like Jake. Will a recording of this webinar be available? And I believe It will be. Yeah. Yep.

So we will definitely get you a copy of that. And then as far as the salting, obviously we don't want you to have to use any harsh chemicals or deicers, which is kind of the whole beauty of having the melting system below that you don't really need to have that salt and corrosive damage. Right. And that'll be, you know, every year I've got to on my driveway, it gets— I get the snow from the city, and I get a bunch of dead grass in my driveway every spring, but it's still better than having 7-foot section of snow on my drive to try to get out from. Mm-hmm.

Okay, so kind of here's our summary of, of what we talked about today. We've got the output, our output requirements on our snow melting mats are about 39 to 50 watts per square foot. This is going to be based what you get on your SmartPlan and versus the ASHRAE data that we use. The machinery, we've gone over like what to avoid, how not to, you know, damage your cables. Don't drive on them.

Practice, practice safe raking. Yeah, yeah. And your control, definitely want to use something that has that over-temperature sensor requirement by NEC code, which is going to be found on your premium control or your zone breaker controls. We always want you to stay compliant with your code. So NEC code is what we try to stick to here.

But your local electricians and inspectors will know what to follow in your area specifically. Just like that, just like Mary says, the overtemperature sensor in the slab is not a National Electrical Code requirement. It's just the requirement of the state of New York, or the state of Vermont, or the state of Colorado. So every— and there may be jurisdictions where the city of New York overrules the state of New York. So there's no way we can keep track of all that coding.

And the thing is, when you're interested in doing a job like this, is always check with your local code. Absolutely. And, and of course, our testing. That's that mega— excuse me— mega ohmmeter. Um, before, during, after.

So as soon as you get it, open up your packages, make sure you have all the items that you've ordered, make sure everything is there correctly, and that you review your plans prior to starting. Get all your ducks in a row. If there's any last-minute changes that have happened, or something was shipped incorrectly or you didn't receive something, that is the time to report it, not the day you're trying to install it. We always like to be ahead of the game and try to make sure that you are good to go before you begin. Yeah.

So here's some common planning mistakes we've already talked about. So let's do it real quick. You can't extend the cold leads. You don't extend the cold leads. The leads get into a junction box and the electrician supplies power from the relay panel to that junction box.

You can never ever cut the heating cable. If you cut or shorten the heating cable, it will overheat and fail, and most importantly, it's not under warranty, right? And single layer pours— you're doing two-layer pours because dropping cables on gravel and then doing 3-inch single coverage is not going to work. And I've seen people with driveways that have RVs and they have a 3-inch single 3-inch pour and that RV is sinking. Okay, that's because of that reason right there.

And if it sinks, it can pull apart the wire and do damage to it. So there are the 3 main things that we run up against. Okay, and we did mention about the slush. That was the after runtime. Definitely you want to make sure you have that set for about 4 to 8 hours post-storm, uh, and, and if it's still not melted, you may just physically have to go to the control and turn it back on, right?

And because No two snows are exactly the same, but you will learn. Like when people get their system the first year and they say, I have this set for this and it doesn't work, it's not working right, you know, they freak out and it's like, this is a learning curve, right? I mean, you're going to have to change this once you find the sweet spot. So and once again, you may get 36 inches of snow one day and 2 inches of snow the next day. Those are not the same thing.

And so that is very, very important to keep that in mind. People will buy this system and their normal snowfall for the year is 24 inches or 26 inches or whatever it is. And then they get a snowstorm of 36 inches and they call us in a panic because there's no— the snow wasn't melting. Well, it's not melting because you were having a very abnormal snow rate, right? You're going to have to turn your after-run time up and you may have to activate it manually a second time because 36 inches is much different than 3.

Absolutely. The uneven melting, likely zoning issue. Somebody that has maybe the power that could have put the whole system onto 2 zones decided they're going to split it up to 4 zones. It's taking forever. They're feeling like it's not doing the job or keeping up like it should be.

So zoning is something that you definitely need to consider early on in the project. Zoning is a compromise. If you don't have 160 amps and you only have 80, then you're going to be doing two zones. Remember, we talked about how the best thing is to heat it all at once.

But if you can't do that, then you make a compromise. If you have one area that heats very well and melts all the time, and it's set to an hour and a half, while the other section that doesn't melt very well is set to 10 minutes, you can see that's what we mean by a zoning issue. One section is on much longer than the other. Try setting it for 8 minutes and 8 minutes.

Or if you have an area that's very important to you, like the area down by the street or the area right in front of the garage, then you may want to have that on for an hour and the other part for half an hour. That's going to be up to you. Once again, that's the thing that you're going to learn after you've had it for a while. You might decide to make one zone last a little bit longer than the other. If your primary spot is here, you can turn it on for longer and not worry about the other part until later.

It can go, but not as long as the first section. Okay, very good. Thanks, Scott. We get this question a lot: the system's not turning on, or the sensor stopped working. Well, a lot of times it comes back to whether it was located in a poor area—too close to the house, too close to bushes, or under an eave or awning.

The last two we've had were right next to the house. It's common for people to mount these in a poor location and then ask us for help on where to mount them. We'll give you some advice, but just keep the sensor in a clean area.

Clean up the top of it a little bit before the season begins. That area is heated, and you know what loves to have a heated area to sit on? Pigeons. Pigeons and all kinds of birds, and they always leave a little calling card.

Once they're done, they always leave a little calling card to let you know they were there. That little calling card will keep the water from reaching the grid. So, check on your sensor each season to make sure it is working prior to the first actual snow event. In fact, the only maintenance on our snow system you have to do is to clean that sensor once a year.

That's why you don't put it on the top of a 74-foot pole, because you need to be able to get to it. You want to put it somewhere where it can't be vandalized, but somewhere accessible where you can clean it every year. One question I seem to get a lot, Scott, is about Wi-Fi controls and snow melting.

I don't like to say that the Wi-Fi control is the best option because, once again, we're looking for that temperature sensor. If it starts to snow in the middle of the night while you're asleep, you aren't going to want to manually hit a Wi-Fi button to turn it on. Why do that when you have a system that will just kick on and have it melted for you automatically by the morning?

Everybody wants Wi-Fi everything. I want everything to have Wi-Fi. But in this case, except for certain situations, you really don't want a Wi-Fi system. You want something that's automatic.

Now, if you're into "if this, then that" programming—where if the weather says it's going to snow, you want it to run for six hours—you can set something up like that with a Wi-Fi switch if you're a coder. You're more than welcome to. But what we find is that people who go to sleep and get four inches of snow want their driveway melted when they wake up. They don't want to have to turn it on then and wait several hours for it to melt. That's one of the benefits of an automatic system.

Great, I think those are all our questions for now. In closing, I want to say thank you for joining us today. You will get an email at the end of this presentation with a PDF of the slides we showed you.

We're going to give you the Pro resource on how to request your quotes. You will also get a rewards coupon for your next project this spring or summer. We also want to invite you to our next webinar in May. We'll be back to floor heating projects, talking about tile heating systems, selections, and planning. That's a great one to join if you're doing any home remodeling with floor heating this coming year.

Mary's going to back me up on this, but I hate snow. I hate shoveling snow. I've got a bad back, so I don't want to shovel anymore. It's like a toothache; once it goes away, you're just glad it's gone. You don't even think about it unless you have the toothache.

We may have shoveled for the last time already this year, and it's the end of April. However, this is the time to think about snow melting. I can't tell you how many people call us in September and October saying their asphalt factory is closing in two weeks and they need to get this done. It's much better to plan for it now while you still remember what a pain it was to shovel that snow.

Now is the time to send us a sketch of your snow melting area. That will give you time to check it out and make sure the drawing is good. Do you have enough amps? Do you have answers to all those questions we talked about? Even though you want to forget about the snow, now is the time to really think about it. Absolutely.

We offer some pro tips, and Scott is doing our monthly pro tips on things like asphalt and snow melting. We also provide 24/7 tech support. If you need assistance on a weekend or have questions, feel free to call our toll-free number. You can also email us at techsupport@warmlyyours.com. We are definitely here to help you.

We will schedule a pre-planning meeting with you and your installers to go over any last-minute questions and ensure your project goes smoothly. That's going to wrap it up, and I'd like to say thanks for watching. It's been great. I love doing these every month, so if you think of a topic we should cover, let us know. Instead of us guessing what you want, tell us, and we'll be glad to address it. Absolutely.

Thanks, everybody. See you on the next one. Take care. Bye.