You are going to LOVE this one... Do you know what this is? It is a cubic foot of snow. What? Yup. OK, so now you are going to think I am a nut case. My sister Joan was telling me about a number of building and barn and home collapses all over Connecticut because of the unusual snow load on the structures. I have been looking at over a foot of snow on my garage roof, and I was getting nervous thinking about the weight. Then I was curious - I wondered how much the snow actually weighed. So the problem is I have no idea how much snow does weigh. So I got a spade and cut a block of snow from the pile along the side of the driveway, and then carefully carved it into a one foot cube. Cool, huh? So then I got the bathroom scale and weighed my block of snow. Guess how much it weighed. Twenty four pounds! So I calculated the weight of snow on the roof of the garage and came up with over six thousand six hundred pounds! Yikes! There is less and less up there each day and I will feel much better when more of it is gone.
Wow those Eskimos must have been amazing engineers building those igloos with no heavy equipment.
ReplyDeleteI thought of Eskimos while doing my "science project!" I am sure that snow can vary a huge amount in its weight. But I recall that igloos have much larger blocks than this. So I won't be building an igloo anytime soon.
ReplyDeleteOne of the nice things about being retired is having a lot of time to take on projects like weighing snow. My curiosity got the best of me so using my Mac and Google I devoted about 30 seconds of my precious retirement time to get some answers too. I got numbers ranging from 4.8 lbs. to more than 20 lbs depending on variables. Since your snow has probably compacted somewhat, I would err on the side of caution and advise you to stay out of the garage until the spring thaw - just in case!
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