Snowmelt Systems

A heated driveway is one of those things that sounds like a luxury until you have lived through a Wasatch Back winter without one. A hydronic snowmelt system circulates warm fluid through tubing under your driveway, walkways and entries, melting snow and ice as it falls. No plowing that piles snow against the garage, no shoveling the front steps at dawn, no ice on the path to the door — the surface simply stays clear.

Snowmelt is about safety as much as convenience. Steep mountain driveways and stone entry stairs turn treacherous the moment they ice over, and they are exactly the places where a slip does the most harm. A well-zoned snowmelt system keeps the surfaces people actually walk and drive on clear and dry all winter.

Because snowmelt is a hydronic system, it pairs naturally with the boiler that heats your floors. We design the two together so a single, well-sized mechanical room can drive radiant heat, domestic hot water and snowmelt, with automatic sensor controls that fire the system when snow and ice are detected and shut it down when it is not needed — so you are not paying to heat bare pavement.

Snowmelt design is unforgiving of shortcuts. Tubing spacing, fluid mix, flow rates and heat-exchanger sizing all have to be right for the surface area and the climate, or you get patchy melting and slow response. We lay out every zone deliberately and commission it for how it actually has to perform at altitude.

Building new is the ideal time to design snowmelt in from the start, but we can also plan systems into driveway and hardscape replacements. If a heated driveway or walkway is on your wish list, reach out and we will walk you through what is possible.