4,800 Pounds

Even in the midst of muscle-breaking hard labor, the nerd at me is still hard at work.

We got about a foot of snow overnight. This morning, around 10:45, I went out to shovel us out. While doing this, I got to thinking: how much snow am I moving?

The internet tells me that a cubic foot of average-density snow weighs about fifteen pounds. Since everything you read on the internet is correct, let’s use this figure.

I started out doing the porch and front steps, the walk to the driveway, a lane along the driveway from garage to sidewalk, twenty-five feet of sidewalk and the driveway apron. I figure, conservatively, that I cleared 120 square feet of surface there. Then, as the girls came out to play in the snow and the wife came out to clean off the cars, I went up onto our flat-roofed garage and cleared that of snow: 200 square feet, approximately.

That’s 320 square feet of area. Since we got twelve inches of snow, give or take, that’s 320 cubic feet of snow.

Multiply that by 15 pounds per cubic foot.

That’s 4,800 pounds of snow.

2-point-4 tons of snow.

Yikes! No wonder my back is killing me.

And it kinda justifies my crazy nervousness about getting the snow off the garage roof. There’s a ton-and-a-half of frozen water pushing down on that roof! If it ever collapses – double yikes!

So – that’s my post for the day. I already soaked in the tub for an hour, and I may be going back in.

After a couple of Alleves.

Or a couple of glasses of wine.