ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit

[danbrotherston]

And electric snow thrower with a cord can be had very cheap, like under 200 dollars:

https://www.canadiantire.ca/en/pdp/certi...p.html#srp

They go up from there, and obviously batteries add some cost.

That is almost exactly what I have. I recommend it. Cord management is annoying but no worse than a cord lawn mower. Depending on how far one has to go this could be a greater or lesser consideration. I use a 30m cord plugged in outdoors and still need to add on an extra cord to get to the furthest reaches of the sidewalk; somebody with a shorter range of required clearing would find this easier.

But based on what I’m hearing here I would have to seriously consider a battery one if I were buying now. The extra cost to avoid dealing with cords might be a good tradeoff.

Yeah, I've used a very similar unit, I found it to be acceptable, but it would have been useless in yesterday's snow. It was kinda handy when I was lazy or my back was hurting, but it wasn't any faster than doing it by hand. Maybe if the snow was particularly heavy but not too deep, it would have been an improvement in shoveling time, but when I didn't have back pain, I shovel pretty fast. But if you're a person who struggles with snow shoveling for any reason it will do the trick for most of our storms.

I had a 100ft cord (so similar length) and that let me do my entire property and my neighbours sidewalks. But cords suck in the winter, because unless you get a very good one, the cold stiffens the plastic casing making them a bit more unwieldy.

While I think corded mowers are just fine for a lot of use cases, I do think battery snow blowers are probably worth the extra investment if you can store them in a garage that doesn't get too cold. And, FWIW I think most of the battery units can use the same battery in a mower in the summer so that's probably a good system to invest in long term.

[jeffster]

My battery powered snow thrower(s) managed to tackle it as well, though I killed the battery(ies). I would say that I would invest in a 2-stage battery unit, but hardly seems worth it when we rarely get dumps like this.

Are those a thing? I have a second-hand plug-in snow thrower which looks like a toy but actually does pretty well. I had assumed that battery operation was infeasible for this application due to the amount of energy required. What sort of operation time do you get? How big are the batteries? My lawn mower is battery operated, which works great: the benefits of gas (no cord) but none of the downsides.

Yeah, I have a regular single stage snow thrower, it usually does the job except the occasional clog. A 2-stage would eliminate that. Batteries isn't heavy, maybe 160 watt hours. My driveway is long enough for 2 cars, but not super wide. I can usually do 2 or 3 snow removals before a recharge. Yesterday, though, it did die just as I finished (I had a foot to go). Obviously the end of driveway was the killer.

I also have a battery powered snow shovel. It likewise did a great job on the open porch and steps. I also used it to make a narrow trail for the snow thrower to get out of the garage.

You can buy 2-stage and even 3-stage snowblowers that are batteries powered, and usually they are self-propelled.

The thing with battery powered devices is that they are super efficient. No waste.

I have had a corded snow thrower before, and I can find any difference, other than battery powered is 100x easier to use, as you're not worried about eating the wire.

Again, this region doesn't get a lot of heavy snowfalls, so any large equipment is almost overkill. I see people lugging their 2 or 3 stage blowers for 5 cm of snow, and it hardly seems worth it. The battery powered blower I have is small enough and easy to handle. And I hate saying this, but it has paid for itself.

[tomh009]

How much power do snowblower batteries put out? A short search showed that an electric lawnmower might use something like 800W under load.

800W would be very low for a snowblower (just over 1 HP). See below for information on wattage of battery units.

1,800W to be precise. Or 1,875W if your mains, like mine, test out at 125V. ;-)

Actually, the NEC and I believe our Canadian code matches it, limits the maximum continuous wattage of equipment on a 15A circuit to only 80% of the breakers capacity, so 1440W is the typical figure I hear.

But yeah, about 2 HP, rather anemic even from a low end gas blower.

Where as a high end battery unit could have 2 * 60 volt batteries * 7.5 amp hours * 5C discharge rate could easily draw up to 4500 Watts... or almost 6 HP which would be typical for a small engine in a snow blower.  That being said, I couldn't find any figures on actual wattage for these units, so I have no idea how much of that capacity they are using.

Yes, 6 hp would translate to about 4500 W. But none of the units I saw show the rating of the motors so I really don't know how much current they draw. Somebody quoted about 20 minutes of runtime from a pair of Ryobi 40 V 6 Ah batteries (using a $1700 snowblower). If that's the case, it ran at roughly 18A x 40 V x 2 = 1440 W ... looks much like what you'd get from a standard house outlet ...

(Of course you can run 20A or 30A equipment from your house panel, too, but you'll need to have the wiring to match.)

[taylortbb]

Actually, the NEC and I believe our Canadian code matches it, limits the maximum continuous wattage of equipment on a 15A circuit to only 80% of the breakers capacity, so 1440W is the typical figure I hear.

You're correct about 80% for continuous loads, both in the US and Canada, but the definition of continuous would not include a snow blower. Continuous is defined in the NEC (and I think mirrored by Canada) as 3 hours or more.

[jeffster]

How much does an electric snow blower cost? I would consider getting one for my parents who are getting fairly frail at their age. An electric one would be perfect so they don't have to continually fill up gas tanks.

I got my snow thrower for $299 (though perhaps it was $399?) back in late 2016/early 2017, I can't remember the exact date. It was from TSC. They have a couple units in stock, though they don't seem to have the same features as mine (my shut was electric, which is super helpful).

[jeffster]

Right.

It's been a long time since we had this type of crazy snow. CTV is saying 25-35 cm in the region, which might be the most in 20+ years.

Can't say were weren't warned, though I still feel bad for people stuck on highways (portions of the 401 in Toronto were closed as well). But at the same time, sometimes you just need to stay indoors until thing cleaned up.

We were warned, and rail is extremely easy to keep keep clear of snow. Even light rail. It wasn't snowing that fast as it took several hours before the 4cm had accumulated that the plows wait for before they start clearing the roads.

If GrandLinq/Keolis wasn't out there running a tram or or two all night to keep the tracks clear, that is incompetence on their part as we can easily expect multiple 5+ centimetre snow falls in a season, even in this day and age of climate change.

Also, how were the City snow plows allowed to just plow the snow over the LRT tracks? As easy as it is for light rail to keep up with falling snow, there's still such a thing as "too deep" for a tram. That is incompetence on the City's part to not make sure that didn't happen. It's also a bit more incompetence for GrandLinq to not expect such might happen and not have a rapid response contingency available.

I think in some cases the stuck vehicles was likely due to snow bank created by plow operators. Though in one of the cases, the unit stuck at Market Station, it was southbound, and there was very deep snow in front of it, but not from the a plow.

So I am guessing I saw these trains just after they started running again, and it doesn't look like that the tracks were cleared, at all.

I was talking to someone that works in transit in the USA, and his thought that our trains are too low to the ground, and that was most likely the issue.

[danbrotherston]

800W would be very low for a snowblower (just over 1 HP). See below for information on wattage of battery units.


Actually, the NEC and I believe our Canadian code matches it, limits the maximum continuous wattage of equipment on a 15A circuit to only 80% of the breakers capacity, so 1440W is the typical figure I hear.

But yeah, about 2 HP, rather anemic even from a low end gas blower.

Where as a high end battery unit could have 2 * 60 volt batteries * 7.5 amp hours * 5C discharge rate could easily draw up to 4500 Watts... or almost 6 HP which would be typical for a small engine in a snow blower.  That being said, I couldn't find any figures on actual wattage for these units, so I have no idea how much of that capacity they are using.

Yes, 6 hp would translate to about 4500 W. But none of the units I saw show the rating of the motors so I really don't know how much current they draw. Somebody quoted about 20 minutes of runtime from a pair of Ryobi 40 V 6 Ah batteries (using a $1700 snowblower). If that's the case, it ran at roughly 18A x 40 V x 2 = 1440 W ... looks much like what you'd get from a standard house outlet ...

(Of course you can run 20A or 30A equipment from your house panel, too, but you'll need to have the wiring to match.)

Yes, like I said, I don't know what wattage the units I looked at were actually using, but there are a wide variety of units available with different battery system:

Here's the 1700 USD Toro unit I was quoting:

https://www.toro.com/en/homeowner/snow-b...-60v-39926

Even if we take the same current draw of 3C (I used 5C which is a typical maximum draw for LiIon batteries) the larger batteries will lead to a wattage of 2700 Watts or 3.6 HP.

Given Toro has another unit for 999 USD that's also at 60 watts, seems like the Ryobi system is significantly less powerful for the price.  But obviously the blowers could be drawing less than maximum power.

I'm also not 100% sure how the power draw would be distributed, the motor should draw more power when under load, so it could be that the maximum power is significantly higher than 3C and 20 minutes is only the average runtime leading to an average draw of 3C.

[jeffster]

How much power do snowblower batteries put out? A short search showed that an electric lawnmower might use something like 800W under load.

800W would be very low for a snowblower (just over 1 HP). See below for information on wattage of battery units.

1,800W to be precise. Or 1,875W if your mains, like mine, test out at 125V. ;-)

Actually, the NEC and I believe our Canadian code matches it, limits the maximum continuous wattage of equipment on a 15A circuit to only 80% of the breakers capacity, so 1440W is the typical figure I hear.

But yeah, about 2 HP, rather anemic even from a low end gas blower.

Where as a high end battery unit could have 2 * 60 volt batteries * 7.5 amp hours * 5C discharge rate could easily draw up to 4500 Watts... or almost 6 HP which would be typical for a small engine in a snow blower.  That being said, I couldn't find any figures on actual wattage for these units, so I have no idea how much of that capacity they are using.

Not sure you can compare power (gas) to power electric. Gas will provide consistent power regardless of load, while electric will suck more energy the harder it works.

I have a PHEV vehicle, and the battery is 8.9 kilowatts, and the electric motor itself is 60 hp. That nets you about 41 km on electric driving, give or take. Because it's a PHEV, the battery is only run down to 20%, then the car snaps into HEV mode. In the end, it works out to 173 watts to travel 1 km in EV mode, or 1.7 KW per 10 km in town. A gas car would likely take 1 litre to drive 10 km, in town, assuming no traffic. 1 litre of gas has 8.9 kilowatts of energy. My math: 4 litres gives you 40 km, and is 35.6 kilowatts of energy, while a typical EV would use 6.8 kilowatts for 40 km, making it over 5x as efficient.

Same rule applies to mowers, blowers, throwers, etc.

[danbrotherston]

We were warned, and rail is extremely easy to keep keep clear of snow. Even light rail. It wasn't snowing that fast as it took several hours before the 4cm had accumulated that the plows wait for before they start clearing the roads.

If GrandLinq/Keolis wasn't out there running a tram or or two all night to keep the tracks clear, that is incompetence on their part as we can easily expect multiple 5+ centimetre snow falls in a season, even in this day and age of climate change.

Also, how were the City snow plows allowed to just plow the snow over the LRT tracks? As easy as it is for light rail to keep up with falling snow, there's still such a thing as "too deep" for a tram. That is incompetence on the City's part to not make sure that didn't happen. It's also a bit more incompetence for GrandLinq to not expect such might happen and not have a rapid response contingency available.

I think in some cases the stuck vehicles was likely due to snow bank created by plow operators. Though in one of the cases, the unit stuck at Market Station, it was southbound, and there was very deep snow in front of it, but not from the a plow.

So I am guessing I saw these trains just after they started running again, and it doesn't look like that the tracks were cleared, at all.

I was talking to someone that works in transit in the USA, and his thought that our trains are too low to the ground, and that was most likely the issue.

"Too low to the ground"...they are low floor trains, that's a feature, not a mistake.

But low floor trains come with compromises, ground clearance is one of them, but one that I suspect is not really a big deal. If the snow was piled so high that ground clearance was an issue, I suspect there would be other problems with pushing through it.

[ac3r]

Also, how were the City snow plows allowed to just plow the snow over the LRT tracks

Well...where are they supposed to put the snow? Snow plows - at least the ones we/most cities have - have angled blades that push it to the right side. Some sections of the track do run on the right side of where vehicles drive. Unless we bought a fleet of plows that have snow blowers that can blow it into a dump truck (which is extremely inefficient), they have to push the snow somewhere. Example, places like this or this. The normal snowplows don't or can't plow this since there is a curb and because the plow can damage the track, so there will be challenges.

When they designed and engineered this thing, they tried to put the tracks in the middle as much as they could for these sort of issues, but there are still sections it was not possible. And, since we live in a climate where we get tons of snow (sometimes, anyway), there will be challenges with snow removal. TBH, the system here runs okay. Comparably, I've spent a lot of time in Russia where they have heavy snowfall and streetcars/trams just like ours (sure it's "rapid transit" LRT and grade separated but still suffers from the same problems with climate and is as slow as a streetcar) and over there you still face days where the snow buggers things up. It's a pretty normal thing, though over here you'd think we would invest in better clearing measures given that we're economically superior.

[Rainrider22]

My blower has two 7.5 amp/hour batteries. They went down a bit faster yesterday because of the volume of snow however, still an impressive length of run time. I was blowing dense snow from the plow as well which impressed me more.

[taylortbb]

Gas will provide consistent power regardless of load, while electric will suck more energy the harder it works.

That's not really any different. Gas engines consume more gas under load (hence driving faster consuming more gas), electric motors will consumer more power under load. Both motors are rated on peak output, not fuel consumption.

My math: 4 litres gives you 40 km, and is 35.6 kilowatts of energy, while a typical EV would use 6.8 kilowatts for 40 km, making it over 5x as efficient.

The ~5x as efficient is correct. It's why even if you charge your EV from fossil fuel sources you're likely still having a significant positive environmental impact compared to a gas car. Even a 75kWh Tesla battery doesn't hold nearly as much energy as a tank of gas, but the range is comparable because the Tesla is 90%+ efficient at turning the electrical energy into kinetic energy.

However, motors are generally rated on their output power, not consumed energy. A 200hp gas car is 200hp (149kW) of peak energy delivered to the drive shaft, not 149kW peak of gasoline consumed. For an electric snow blower the two numbers are likely very close, due to the high efficiency, but for a gas snow blower the numbers will be quite different. So a 4hp gas snow blower should be pretty comparable to an electric snow blower consuming 3kW.

[ac3r]

"Too low to the ground"...they are low floor trains, that's a feature, not a mistake.

But low floor trains come with compromises, ground clearance is one of them, but one that I suspect is not really a big deal. If the snow was piled so high that ground clearance was an issue, I suspect there would be other problems with pushing through it.

I don't even get why the hell we went with low floor trains. They make sense for trams and streetcars where passengers get on and off on the street or platforms no higher than a normal curb, but for our LRT? They still require platforms - in our case ours are at least 30cm+. We could have just purchased normal trains and raised the platforms, though I suspect one reason why is because we felt compelled to purchase from Bombardier, who completely screwed up our order with delays and resulted in 11 of them about to fall apart until Bombardier mechanics came to repair them anyway.

I wonder...if it wasn't for Bombardier, maybe our LRT would have launched on its start date rather than something like 3 years later and then wouldn't have the welding issues that caused even more problems. And if we went with non-low floor trains, perhaps 20-25cm of snow wouldn't cripple our entire rapid transit system.

[tomh009]

Yes, 6 hp would translate to about 4500 W. But none of the units I saw show the rating of the motors so I really don't know how much current they draw. Somebody quoted about 20 minutes of runtime from a pair of Ryobi 40 V 6 Ah batteries (using a $1700 snowblower). If that's the case, it ran at roughly 18A x 40 V x 2 = 1440 W ... looks much like what you'd get from a standard house outlet ...

(Of course you can run 20A or 30A equipment from your house panel, too, but you'll need to have the wiring to match.)

Yes, like I said, I don't know what wattage the units I looked at were actually using, but there are a wide variety of units available with different battery system:

Here's the 1700 USD Toro unit I was quoting:

https://www.toro.com/en/homeowner/snow-b...-60v-39926

Even if we take the same current draw of 3C (I used 5C which is a typical maximum draw for LiIon batteries) the larger batteries will lead to a wattage of 2700 Watts or 3.6 HP.

Given Toro has another unit for 999 USD that's also at 60 watts, seems like the Ryobi system is significantly less powerful for the price.  But obviously the blowers could be drawing less than maximum power.

I'm also not 100% sure how the power draw would be distributed, the motor should draw more power when under load, so it could be that the maximum power is significantly higher than 3C and 20 minutes is only the average runtime leading to an average draw of 3C.

Are those coulombs you are using for current? A coulomb is one ampere for the duration of one second, I think you want just plain old amperes (and then power is measured in watts, and one watt is equal to one amp at one volt).

Anyway, that Toro has two 7.5 Ah batteries. If it has the same 20-minute runtime at heavy load, then it's 22.5A x 60V x 2 = 2700W. That's roughly the same as a 20A household circuit. (Coulombs are generally not useful for calculating power as they include the time element.)

Of course, if the Toro can run only 10 minutes on those batteries, then the draw is much higher.

[taylortbb]

Are those coulombs you are using for current?

I believe Dan is referring to the C-rate, http://web.mit.edu/evt/summary_battery_s...ations.pdf . It's a way of measuring discharge current that's normalized for battery capacity, a 1C discharge rate will fully discharge a battery in 1 hour. It basically measures how much stress a battery is under, as the safe discharge rate of a battery depends heavily on its capacity.