Salt isn't effective when it gets really cold so it tends to be applied more around freezing as opposed to below. It also depends on the road surface temperature as well, heat of the sun melts off snow and that freezes at night. So you'll find salt has to be applied intelligently to the conditions, on bridges for example, which I suppose would come from experience.
I also observe southern states seem to use more rubber instead of rock in their road surface. So that might be a factor on how robust they are to wear.
My Grandpa worked for the MN highway department until around 1995 when he retied, so my information is a bit out of date, but chemistry doesn't change that much so I doubt it is very different today.
Regularly see accidents all winter long from goofs sliding straight across multiple lanes of traffic or going off into the ditch. Only some of us are prepared.
We don’t salt, only drop sand grit and gravel sparingly. Our roads become ice rinks or snow piles for a decent portion of the winter.
Your comment about us being “better equipped” made me chuckle as I spent this morning watching my neighbours play slip-and-slide in the cul-de-sac cause they opted to not put their winter tires on.
As someone who grew up in the mountains, their behaviour is downright dangerous in my opinion.
Heh. At least they have them, and/or know what they are. I have been met with "they make tires just for snow?" when talking about snow tires in the US before.
Ignorance can be the death of ya! Thank goodness most of them aren’t trying to drive up here!
Yes, New York like most States is full of dozens and dozens of counties with less than 10,000 people but they add up and while the city proper of Buffalo is like 1/10th a single Borough in population, it too has suburbs and exurbs. Even the area around Fort Drum is just over 100k people.
Then there is every doofus in a Suburban skidding around like a kid on a 2-ton toboggan rocking summer tires as they tell everyone, "my truck is heavy, it pushes down THROUGH the snow!"
Some people refuse to even buy an all-season even when they know it exists.
They make their payments and trade when the warranty expires. It's an appliance.
I get that some people don't have space for an oil pan, but tons do. Brake pad replacement doesn't require anything besides the jack from your car and a socket wrench.
I'd have probably been more comfortable in a garage, wherein: I could leave things as they sat and would know that they'd be exactly where I left them when returning the next day.
But I didn't have a garage nearby that I could use. I kept the area clean and picked up all of my tools and detritus if I went in even for as much as a sandwich, and worked as expediently as my time would allow as I puzzled out this new-to-me problem of "bodywork."
I didn't get hear any complaints. The owner of the place would stop sometimes on his way through to make sure I was doing OK and would ask if I needed anything, and soon enough the car was put together better than it ever was on my watch.
And it's not hard to see why.
I had a GE washing machine start misbehaving one day. It would fill the tub, do a few spins to try and balance the load, start to spin up for a few minutes, stop. Try and balance the load, spin for a few minutes, stop. Then eventually just give up, without even draining the tub before unlocking the door.
Me knowing appliances pretty well, I already had the knowledge the service manual is probably tucked away inside the shell. Strike one going against most normal people, they wouldn't know to do that. Open that up, see how to get into the diagnostic menu and translate the error codes and run some tests.
Ok, so now I know it's a speed sensing issue. The speed the motor is reporting and the speed the tub speed sensor isn't making sense for the fixed gear ratio so it thinks there's something unsafe going on. That's a decent safety issue, but looking at the tub as it spins it's probably just a sensor issue.
The tub hall effect sensor was like $20 shipped from the GE parts website. Quick and easy to swap out. No dice, still not wanting to spin up. More reading online, it's likely the main motor inverter board. Well, that's pretty deep in the machine, could also be the motor assembly itself which would be covered under warranty, let me call a GE service guy to come.
Service guy comes, he plugs some wireless adapter into a hidden USB port, fumbles with it for a few minutes with an iPad with a shattered screen, gives up diagnosing the issue. Writes up an invoice proposal for $900 worth of parts and labor for him to swap out a ton of things, or a referral code/discount coupon for me to buy a new unit.
I decline the order. Surely not all this shit is wrong with the thing. I find the inverter board online from a third party site for <$100, was available from the official parts site for not much more. Start unplugging it a bunch, and notice the motor hall sensor pin wasn't seated very well. I don't want to put it all together again just to find reseating/gluing the connection together didn't solve the problem, so I just put the new inverter board in. Put it all back together and it's just fine for <$100.
I imagine it was just a loose connection for that sensor. This is probably still a perfectly functional board on my shelf. I'll keep it and the other sensor in case some other issues happens in the future. But it could have been just a loose connection that sent this nearly $1000 unit to the scrapyard if it wasn't for me bothering to look. It could have been an exceptionally cheap part. And the final fix I accepted was just somewhat cheap part.
In the end people generally don't care to actually fix shit, and I imagine the majority of people would have just thrown up their hands before looking for the service manual, called the tech, he would have made it obvious a new unit would be a better deal, and they would have taken it.
I bought the part-number equivalent part and the prongs didn't fit in the slot. I spent 45 minutes carefully filing down/snipping the prongs to fit the enclosure. Been 5? years without an issue.
One would expect that there is nothing more standard than USB-A. Nope. There is an exception for every rule.
Is that the conclusion to this whole story?
And if I didn't have enough knowledge and determination past a standard consumer it would have been trash. Sadly most consumers and support techs don't care enough.
How many hours of labor did he spend testing, researching, retesting, ordering parts, trying something new, etc. all without a working washer? If that is something you enjoy and take pride in, that is one thing. But as a pure utility proposition for most people, it is way more expensive to rip apart complex machines for the possibility of being able to repair them.
Getting it into the maintenance mode, getting the error code values, deciphering the hex error codes, running the tests and knowing what the tests meant was all in that service manual.
As far as my own personal time actually working on it, I probably spent a total of three hours. Shipping for the parts were overnight and two days. However, I did spend four days waiting from the time I scheduled a tech to come out and had that experience, which probably took less than an hour. All in all it was a hair over a week without a functional washing machine.
This was a $900 washing machine that wasn't quite four years old. There was no way I was going to be down to buy yet another washing machine of similar quality and featureset so soon after.
I do agree, this is probably still a bit much to expect a random person to know/do. I'm more just disappointed in service techs who tend to just throw up their hands and offer to sell someone a new appliance instead of spending even a small amount of time looking into it. The guy was supposedly some top GE certified master technician but could barely even understand it or care to look into it. He spent more time putting together an invoice for parts I didn't need than he did looking into it. He didn't bother reading any of the debugging I had done previously which I saw were in his dispatch case notes.
Theoretically the guy knew what model of device he was going to go repair. He already had some diagnostics. He could have had a few spare parts to test with in his truck. This inverter board is the same one used in a lot of appliances, its not like its a one-off part. But instead he was trying to sell me a new front panel, a new main logic board, the same hall sensor I had already replaced and noted in the case notes, the inverter board, a new wiring harness, and I forget what else.
i.e. if I spend 3 days figuring out my washing machine, I'm trading leisure time (bought at whatever my salary rate is) for the cost of the machine. If the machine is a nightmare to open up and close, then I don't really blame people for just buying a new one.
A bunch of this can obviously be mitigated: right-to-repair is a good start, but we also need incentives for serviceability - the example you give of being able to actually get diagnostic data is one area (IMO: that should just be legally mandated as open-source, make it a national security policy - which it is IMO). Firmware blobs for chips should also be public - i.e. I've got a few things where the microcontroller is dead, I can source a replacement, but there's no way to get a copy of the onboard programming.
And then obviously, if we could somehow encourage design which means components are easy to remove, that would be great (i.e. logic and control boards should always be mounted accessibly).
I've had similar experiences with other appliances over the years. It's not just a GE thing.
I was over giving a neighbour a can of spray foam. The complexity of it was no more than that of spray paint. You point the nozzle into the hole, pull trigger, it fills with foam. Done.
They spent more time asking me how to use it than it would have taken to patch the hole (~10 seconds).
New England too. At best only a minority of people use snow tires here.
Which should beg the question if these things are as magical as the internet cheerleaders say they are then why doesn't everyone in these sorts of states have them.
When we go up into the mountains in winter, either the roads are cleared and we can drive on them with normal tires, or it's snowing heavily and we put snow chains on the tires and drive slowly. I've only had to use snow chains a couple times in my life because I generally only go into the mountains when it's not currently snowing, which is most of the time.
Climate change has made the climate drier here, the mountains get a lot less snow than they used to. It also helps that real winter with snow storms only lasts about 3 months.
What you need here are tires that can handle huge amounts of rain. Which, in the western US, is not an issue.
On regular roads theyre too inconvenient and make you go too slow. Slap on quality winter tires in November and you’re good to go with no more effort.
Can confirm, definitely Canadian!
We just had a massive first snow dump in Regina here. 15-20cm in 24h. It's treacherous out there, I was in 4HI all morning trying to get around.
Winter tires are very important in places where they get bad weather but don't clear the roads. Those are not generally places people live though.
If you do mean summer tires that seems almost unbelievable to me. I have some experience both on the roads as well as skidpans with both.
With actual summer tires on even non-icy light snow cover you:
- have almost no braking
- get nothing but wheelspin on any sort of hill
- start spinning out in corners if you go >10mph.
The worse the winter weather gets, the more stuck you become if there has been no salting for an hour.
Meanwhile with winter tires you can safely go up to 60mph on compacted snow and actually get to a stop within a mile.
Hell, even just the fact that summer tires are hard as rocks in cold temps would make me wanna at least buy all-seasons.
Just how aggressively and how often do they salt in WI, considering the climate?
disclaimer: grew up in a country with mild-ish winters where winter tires are mandatory, never spent much time in the parts of NA that do get winters.
I think it might only be an Alberta, BC provincial thing though.
So I totally understand why folks who can barely afford to put gas in their car are driving around on all-seasons year round (and ending up in the ditch frequently).
The F-150 and maybe the studs play the biggest role here. I kept it below $400 for my small hatchback, even though I went for Conti (but it was before COVID).
Perhaps more important - salt's effectiveness fades as the temperature decreases. Sand and gravel do not have that problem. So if you're running the Road Dept. in an area where serious cold ain't some rare event - why would you bother with salt?
EDIT: I know the "melt to pavement, solar heating finishes the job" tactic. Which can work with heavier snowfall, if you plow/shovel before salting. Colder weather inhibits both halves of the melt-&-heat. (Plus the further north you are, the shorter & slantier the sun's rays get, even on clear days.)
The salt isn't really for the snow, it's for ice. Temperatures above like 10F, the sun will still cut through an untreated road surface and glaze over. Even with snow, because the top layer will still freeze, that nice crunch you get. The hazard is you have a smooth surface that your tires can't grip onto well when the sun goes down. I know it sounds counter intuitive but snow will still melt on very cold days because without wind you get a localized heating effect from the sun.
The nice thing is, ice gets increasingly grippy the further down you go. It's the around freezing temps that get you. And bridges since rather than the ground holding temperatures, now you've got an air conditioning going on under the road. That's why salt is so useful over say grit because it changes the freezing point of the water.
Road is all torn up and patched up. It has been a boondoggle of construction cones and heavy machinery for months now.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-roadwork-indu... and many many other reports.
Not sure about those states in particular, but I have anecdotally noticed that some of the places with the harshest winters do some of the least road salting -- because salt is mostly usable for light to moderate snowfall and the people who live in the harshest climates are often better equipped to drive on hard packed snow.