sNOw DAYS OFF

Working Hard, or Hardly Working?

This week was supposed to be my relaxed week. I just finished my indoor season at nationals this past weekend. So, no running, no exercise for a week! What makes this week even better is that we got a snow day so I had more of an excuse to do nothing. But, knowing that my cars (and physics grade) depended on it, I got the motivation to go clear my driveway.

We have a snowblower, so we used that for the majority of our clearing. However, there were some stubborn piles of snow that we attacked with the shovel.

How much work would we have done if we shoveled all of it? We had to move the snow off of the driveway. There was about 10 inches of snow (.254 m) when we went out. Our driveway is 20 m x 10 m. On average, newly fallen snow is around 100 kg per cubic meter. There was 50.8 meters cubed of snow on the driveway. Multiplied by the density, the total mass of this snow was 5080 kg.

Let's assume we moved the snow an average of 15 m. Some blocks moved more than this, but some were less. The force we applied to the snow to move it was at least that of its weight, 5080*9.8= 49,784 N. Moving it 15 meters, it takes 746,760 J to move all that snow. This might be on the conservative side, because we actually applied more than the force of gravity to the snow (in order for it to accelerate)

All I can say is, bless whoever made snowblowers. That is too many joules for me. Apparently, 746,760 J is 178 kilo calories. So in order to shovel the whole driveway, I could have burned off two tablespoons of peanut butter. Or I can just eat the peanut butter anyways and resume my Netflix binge watching, and let the snowblower do all the hard work.

Here is some bonus footage of me shoveling some snow that the blower couldn't get to.