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this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2025
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Think about how much you'd want to be paid per hour and how many hours it would take to clear 14" of snow. Compare that to the $26.33 it cost this guy. Seems cheep to me.
Buffalo gets on average 56 days of snow with 10 of those being heavy snow.
26.33 one day isn’t bad but 400-600 dollars annually? That’s a different story. I suppose you could just limit use for heavy storms but that’s still 250-300. Average operating costs appear to be 300-800/yr which probably varies wildly based on geography
And this of course glosses over the gigantic cost of installing the driveway, which apparently can cost from 3,000-25,000 and averages 4800 for a small one car driveway and 12,500 for a 2 car driveway. The systems typically last 15-20 years. The good news from what I’ve read is that in a boiler system the pex tubing should last 40-50 years so the 20 year service life wouldn’t be as costly since you’d just be replacing the boiler/pump and not the entire system. The electric systems seem to last slightly longer (~25 years) but the cabling can fail and then the driveway needs to be torn up.
So if you have a small one car driveway that cost goes up $240 a year and $625 a year for a 2 car driveway, most of that being a bulk up front payment. And this assumes you have the resources liquid to make such a payment, if you’re financing those numbers probably go up since you’re paying interest.
Also environmental perspective: use a decent amount of power (though not as much as you’d think, about as much as a clothes dryer unless your driveway is huge) and tbf this can be mitigated by having clean sourced energy (eg a house with solar). Another concern is a hydro system developing a leak which would leak antifreeze into the soil (though if this happens you’re screwed bc the driveway generally has to be tore up)
I absolutely hate shoveling snow, I literally dropped $600 on a snowblower, but I can’t fathom investing in something like this unless you’re obscenely wealthy. Huge up front costs, pretty noticeable annual operating costs, costly appliance replacement cycles added onto my home, etc
That said if you were my neighbor and had one I’d probably be a little envious as I trudged through the snow looking at your clean ass driveway. Not enough to drop 4-12k + yearly fees on a new driveway, but enough be like “that must be fuckin nice”
You did skip the whole "paying yourself" part though. How much is your work worth?
I skipped it because that’s spurious reasoning. I’d like to be paid $100 an hour for backbreaking labor but no one will pay me that. No one will pay me anything for it.
The only thing this can possibly do is cost me. It is a question of whether it costs me money or time, sure, and I get that you’re making the argument that one is the most precious resource hustle culture pay yourself etc, but in the real world I have a (relatively) fixed amount of money and have to stick to a budget just as much as I have to budget my time.
It's a real question. As an XRay tech I get paid $29.90/hr. That's the real value of my work right now. Assuming I have the money available, if the cost is less than that, it makes sense for me to pay to not have to do it.
You’re making a false equivalence between billable hours and personal hours. You’re paid 29.90 because you’re doing a specific task at a specific time, outside of those hours your time has a much different market value depending on what you are you able and willing to contract (which I assume is often nothing given you already have employment).
The value of your work is contextual, basically. Mine too, everyone’s is.