In climates where you get heavy snowfall (e.g. the northeast) most such systems can’t keep up, and you end up with a foot of snow sitting on a crust of ice, which is harder to clean up. The system will catch up eventually, melting from the bottom up, but it’s inefficient and very slow (and you get ice dams if there are any cold spots).
Sufficiently powerful systems work well, but are $$$$ and relatively energy-intensive, from my understanding. Paying the neighborhood plow guy is easy.
Plus at -40C, how do you keep up? You are battling everything being cold, including the ground under you.
People in this thread are saying "just heat always..." wha?! Heating an insulated home is crazy expensive at -40C, and you want to heat a driveway from -40C to 10C, and melt all the snow?!
(Heating to 0C is not sufficient to melt and let stuff run off, it will freeze again too fast.)
And beyond that, now the end of your driveway is solid ice. Or it will be, as the drain freezes.
A gas snow blower is better for the environment, 100x better, than that.
The good news is that at –40 it barely snows and the stuff that does fall is super light so you can just let the wind blow it away and clear the drifts, but yeah, exactly this.
I have heating in my driveway, it’s OK if it’s just a little bit of snow, but other than that it’s worse than useless. Most of the winter I keep it off and clear the snow with a good old fashioned flatbed shovel thing. Like this: https://www.obs.no/bygg-og-hage/hage-og-uterom/vinterredskap...
Sufficiently powerful systems work well, but are $$$$ and relatively energy-intensive, from my understanding. Paying the neighborhood plow guy is easy.