How does the snow dragon eat and digest snow?

For cities plagued by yearly snowstorms, a fleet of snow plows and salt often aren't enough to get rid of excess drifts. Luckily, there's another option: Snow dragons. These machines can melt snow on the spot -- but how do they work? Tune in to find out.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to brain Stuff from how Stuff Works dot com
where smart Happens. Hi, I'm Marshall Brain with today's question,
what is a snow dragon and how does it eat
and digest so much snow? The northern cities of the

(00:22):
United States have experienced a lot of snow this winter,
a lot of snow, many feet of snow. If you've
been to Chicago or New York City, you've seen the snow.
They have a problem because you can only plow so
much snow before it creates giant snow walls and giant
snow canyons on the streets of a big city. So,

(00:45):
for example, if you're in New York City and you're
a city manager and you need to get rid of
snow on the street, you can plow it to the
side only so much because there are part cars on
the side. And then there's the sidewalk. And if you've
been to New York City in the evening, you know
that the sidewalk is important not only for pedestrians, but
because that's where people put their trash for trash pickup.

(01:08):
If you pile the sidewalks up with ten ft of
snow from the streets, then you cut off all pedestrian
access and you make it impossible to pick up garbage,
and you have a mess. So you have to do
something else with the snow. And in the past there
have only been two options. You can either pick it
up with front end loaders and dump it into parking

(01:30):
lots or vacant lots or city parks or someplace like that.
You pile it up in huge mountains, or you can
take a front end loader and dump the snow into
dump trucks and truck it out of the city. Within
the last few years, a new tool has become available
to big cities that are experiencing way too much snow.
It's called the snow Dragon, and it gives city managers

(01:54):
another option. A snow dragon and machines like it from
other manufacturers are giant and snow melting machines that will
melt snow on the spot. If you've ever seen a
snow dragon, you know that it's a fairly simple device.
It's form is a big trailer that you would pull
behind a truck, and part of the trailer is a

(02:16):
large diesel engine and a large diesel burner, and the
other part of the trailer is a huge tank into
which front end loaders can dump snow. So in operation
you have front end loaders pulling up and dumping snow
into the tank. And in that tank there's a large
quantity of water, you know, maybe ten thousand gallons of

(02:39):
water or something like that. That water is being pumped
by a diesel powered pump through a heating unit, a
diesel powered heating unit to get warmed up, so it's
pumped out of the tank through the heater back into
the tank through spray nozzles, and this gives a snow
dragon a way to melt snow very very quickly, because

(03:01):
hot running water is the enemy of snow, so as
snow goes in, it gets turned into water, and as
more snow gets in, the water overflows out of pipe
and it's then just run into the normal sewer system
or the street drainage system of the city. Snow dragons
and the machines like it are not cheap. They cost

(03:24):
about a quarter of a million dollars each, and they're
fairly expensive to operate. They cost about three hundred dollars
an hour to operate because they're burning forty or fifty
gallons of diesel fuel per hour to generate the heat
that's needed to melt the snow. But the advantages They
can process something like thirty tons of snow per hour,

(03:46):
which is a huge quantity of snow, and you have
to compare that cost to the cost of trucking. So
if you were loading that snow into dump trucks and
hauling it for miles outside the city, that would have
a cost for the dump trucks and for the fuel
to fuel those dump trucks. So by comparison, a snow

(04:06):
dragon actually starts to look fairly reasonably priced, probably even
lower costs than a large scale dump truck operation. The
next time you're in a big city and there's a
bunch of snow, keep an eye out for front end
loaders that are moving the snow around. Generally speaking, they'll
either be moving it into a parking lot or into

(04:27):
a dump truck, or they'll be loading it into one
of these new snow dragon machines. Be sure to check
out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join
how Stuff Work staff as we explore them as promising
and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The House Stuff Works I
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