Outdoor Power Equipment (Lawn Mowers, Snow Blowers, Chain Saws and more) Discussions

I'm looking for something that would be good for doing our roof. obviously the big 2 stage Toro won't be able to do it and would be a PITA to get up a ladder or out a window.

We have a new roof so I don't want to hurt the roof but the snow is really built up out there and it tends to melt very slowly. We are heading into Feb and lots more snow so I need something light enough and easy to manuever to use up there. The roof is pretty steep and in one section windows are mounted in the roof so that area might not be possible. They want a fortune to clear it and only the lesser section so I need something. Electric would probably be ok but it has to have enough power and the roof is pretty steep and high.

Any ideas?

Steve_Cebu wrote:
Ouch!

We live in a modest 1800 square foot house with 14' high vaulted ceilings in a couple rooms.  We situated the house to capture as much solar heat as possible in the winter.  Lots of south facing windows and no shade.  Temps can dip to -40F.  We seldom see gas bills over $200.00 a month during winter and my wife likes it fairly warm. 

borat wrote:

This house is easily larger than yours. It was originialy designed for big parties and a lot of people. 2 Presidents have been in this house Carter and Ford, plus a lot of other political big shots over the years. That was when it was my uncles house. It's such an impractical house tho. The glass in the living room is all R1, so .5 better than a screen door.  Plus most of 2 walls are mostly glass with no sun hitting them.

We have the biggest sliding glass doors I've ever seen in a house. 8-9 feet so over 4 foot for each panel! This house has 3 sliders like that. We also have nothing but shade here so nothing melts until late in the season. The plus side is we almost never need A/C it's cold even in the summer. It'svrey cold here too. If we lose power during a cold spell we will usually lose the pipes, that's happened 4 times in the past 15 years!

Steve, Time for a standby generator. I got myself a 12kw from generac with automatic transfer. I have gotten plenty of use as we have our share of power outages.

hirschallan wrote:

I was going to get one last year but my aunt lives here with us and she is terrified of things like that so we can't get one. If you had an 86 year old hysterical Greek woman living with you you'd understand.

Steve_Cebu wrote:
Well, if you're going to live in an 7000 square foot house, I guess you're going to have to live with proportionately larger heating costs.    

That's why my wife and I selected an energy efficient style of home on a south facing lot and built it to the size specifications we wanted.   We could have easily built something much bigger but, we're not ostentatious.   That's not our style.  We probably have one of the smaller homes on our street.  We don't complain about heating nor cooling the house.   It's a very easy place to live with. 

If we have a power outage, there are two very large, high efficiency, zero clearance fire places in the house and I have about four cords of seasoned wood in a shed out back to carry us through a couple months if necessary.  I do have a back up generator though.          

borat wrote:

This house was in our family and my aunt had it built to her specifications. She's into "Modern" which of course is extremely outdated now. I would never have built a house like this, it's too huge and impractical. That said most of our neighbors have much bigger houses.

This house has no attic so a lot less insulation there, The rooms have angles, it's kinda funky. I won't mention the blaze orange rugs with orange and yellow foil wallpaper or what used to be Blue foil wallpaper in the Master bedroom!

Oh and she wanted an oil furnace to replace the electric heat so she had the burner installed right in front of the downstairs garage door, so that is now unusable! It's a real Frankenhouse. The kitchen while measuring a whopping 22'x25' looks like Pee Wee Herman designed it IN THE '70's! I need to redo everything and I mean everything but I'll likely just sell it and move elsewhere. Smaller is better nowadays. I do like the quiet and all the wildlife we have around us. You can walk in the back woods for a long time. It's all dead land back there. no one is going to build on it, ever.

Your house sounds really nice.

Steve_Cebu wrote:

Your house sounds like a good candidate for geothermal heating.  And a good candidate for a slick steel roof!     Most of all, you need to figure out a way to get some more insulation in the roof!

As for a backup generator, I have a propane 3.5kw unit, hook it up when needed on the back patio, run the HD 30A power cord through a capped pipe I have going under the deck to inside the house just above the dropped ceiling in the walkout basement.  From there, I can run the electric blower on the propane fireplace (centrally located downstairs, so gets heat to most of the house), as well as the TV, cable modem and laptop, so I'm set if the power goes out.    I got the propane generator to hook up to the 500-gal bulk tank, but the manual says it needs a higher PSI (like from a BBQ tank), so just have it hooked to a 100-lb tank for now until I get the pressure stuff figured out - nice that I don't have to worry about bad gas getting into the generator.

longboat wrote:

The problem with geo thermal heating is you need wells and we have so much ledge around here that it's lucky we even have a well, and it's an artisian well like 400 feet deep! Geothermal is nice but would cost us about $60k to install. I had to go through hell just to have my aunt not freak out about my Weber BBQ grill. She's all no go on a generator and when we lost power during the ice storm she fired up the fireplace in the kitchen and toughed it out. It was Damn cold too! She's terrified of Propane and really any kind of gas. Gasoline not as much but she doesn't want a generator. She's at that age where she hates change. We had to change the kitchen faucet a 40 year old Koehler, she wasn't happy but the thing was leaking badly and it had to go, now if we could just replace the blaze orange sink....

I like gas I used it overseas and it was great. I had natural gas (prefer it) in all my other houses. Just here I can't do it and they really gouge you on propane up here. If I heated with that I'd be spending at least $500 a month more.

How I really wanted a metal roof but they were just too much money. I was up on the roof and there is no way to add more insulation to the roof without a full rebuild.

Good ideas tho!

Not to be rude Steve, but is you aunt a Luddite?  Sounds like she has a real aversion to technological advancement of any kind.  

Metal roofing is good provided the house design is suitable for it.  If you have an entrance under a slope, it could be dangerous unless a snow brake is installed.  Then you loose the self shedding aspect. 

That's the problem with modern home building designs.  Everyone wants a fancy, unique looking home and that leads to complicated roof configurations (ours included).   Fortunately, our buildings at camp are simple structures that lend themselves well to metal roofing which is a good thing for a number of reasons.  Snow shedding is one, durability another and more importantly, forest fire resistance.   We get plenty of forest fires up here and have had two recently fairly close to our camp (Ham Lake MN fire 2007 was most recent).   Structures with asphalt shingles are very susceptible to catching fire during a forest fire.   During a forest fire, the updraft  sends so much burning matter into the air and the wind can carry it for miles.  It's not uncommon for burning branches to drop on asphalt roofs causing a fire.  That's why forest fire fighters put gas powered water pumps down at the lake shore, run a line to the structures and put sprinklers on the roofs.  They also hose down the area close to the camp then let the sprinkler do it's thing before they bug out.

One thing I noticed after installing the metal roof at camp was that I had to run external antennas to get radio reception.     

borat wrote:

She is very adamant that she "at her age" doesn't like change of any kind. She's a self confessed luddite although she wouldn't use that actual term. She's gotten much worse as she's gotten older. She literally hasn't moved any furniture in the house except for cleaning in many years. She saw my wifes iPod nano and was completlely amazed, but she can't figure out how to use a very simple and basic cellphone, but she can get her email, she never deletes any of it tho.

So yeah it keeps life uh... interesting.

Metal roof would work here but yes the doors would need those snow brakes but only in a few places. If we ever had a nearby forest fire well that's why we have insurance. There are no fire hydrants except for teh water resevoir 2.5 miles down the road, so they'd save the basement. Maybe that's why gas and fire terrifies her so much?

The new roof will outlast me as it's a 50 year roof and by then I'll probably be a self confessed luddite too.