How to Create a Heated Driveway with a Snow Melting System

Hello Thank you so much for joining us. My name is Lynn. I am a customer service rep here at WarmlyYours. I am joined by wonderful. My name is. Oh, you're talking to me. My name is Scott. I'm from WarmlyYours also. Thanks for coming, everybody. Yes Thank you so much for joining us. So today, like it says here, we're going to be talking about installing heated driveways. We're going to be going over our snow melting systems and we're also going to be going over some example projects. If you have any questions, please be sure to ask. If you don't ask them or if we don't see them right away, we'll definitely get to them by the end of the presentation. You can type those either in that sidebar chat or at the bottom of the screen in the ask the question module. And we'd be happy to answer any questions you might have really on any topic, but especially snow melting. And if you're watching this on Facebook live, then we have somebody watching the live chat area there too. So feel free to chime in there if you decide that you'd like to. Yes, Thank you. All right. So like I said, we're going to be going over our snow melting systems. We're going to be talking about installation underneath asphalt, concrete and pavers. So our electric snow melting systems are designed to be embedded in either pavement like concrete or asphalt or in the mortar or sand that would be going underneath pavers. And these are really designed to evenly heat the surface of the area so that any snow or ice will melt and eventually evaporate and not refreeze either. So going to be kind of going into if you want to have a system automated versus if you want to have it manually turn up turning it on and off, things like that. So there's a lot of ways to really customize these systems to you and how you plan to utilize them. Yeah, and that leads us to our first question since we are talking about questions here just a second ago. And we always ask for questions ahead of time. And we got a question from Mark L saying, can this be installed with HBP 1/4 inch chip? If this is like a chip seal where they chip it and then seal it? This product is not designed for that. The product is not compatible with 1/4 inch chip seal you or gravel lot. We get questions all the time. Can I put this in my gravel driveway? And the answer to that is no. It does not comply with code requirements. It needs to be protected from a hard by a hard surface that can't wear away. The problem with gravel is it wears away. Years go by and you'll see the gravel. Eventually you'll have two ruts and eventually it'll get down to where the cable is. That's why you can't use it with gravel. And the anatomy of the system will not work with Chip and seal. So if that's what you're looking for. So that was a great question. Thank you for that question ahead of time. And we've got the first one answered. If you have any other questions, feel free. Feel free to let us know. Absolutely so, Scott, can you tell us a little bit about testing the snow melting system to make sure that, you know, kind of to start off that we're working with a working system? Yeah, the last thing you want to do is put in a system that doesn't work. So what you ideally want to do is you want to test it to make sure it's good. Well, the way to test it is with a mega o meter and an OAM meter. A mega o meter sends voltage down the wires to check the insulation between them. So really it's an insulation testers what a mega o meter is. So it's making sure that no power can get from the heating wires to the ground. There's actually three wires in the heater. Two of them are heating circuit and one of them is a ground. So you want to make sure that no voltage ever leaks to ground. And that's what the mega o meter does. It shoots 500 volts down the line and then it has one clamp on the ground to see if any power goes from that into ground. And if it does, it'll say you've got a problem, so you're going to need to get one of these or most electricians have them. Just make sure that the electrician knows this ahead of time, that they're going to need a mega o meter along with a regular o meter, because the home values are written on the mat, on a pin, on a sticker. So you want to make sure those homes are correct and that the megaohm test is good so you don't have any leakage into ground. Absolutely so we offer smart plans here at warm leaders. And what these really are layouts of the space that you want to heat, showing our products in that space and how they'll fit, how you be cutting and turning them and getting the coverage that you're looking for. So this is a really great example of a smart plan. And you can see the actual it'll show you where you'll be starting and ending each of the maps, where you'll be cutting and turning maps as needed as well as a smart plan. There is a lot of information that you'll want to look over, including electrical specs. So things like the total wattage for the system, the breakers needed. That's one of the biggest things that you'll want to be aware of before starting the project. And then other things like operating cost. Now, this job was an asphalt job, so this job requires an over temperature sensor. Asphalt jobs require these to make sure that the slab doesn't get too hot and turn it to soup. If for some reason somebody leaves it on manually in the middle of the summer. So what that does is that you don't worry about that with concrete. Concrete doesn't turn to soup, but asphalt when it gets really, really hot, can get really soft. So you want to watch out for that. That's why there's an over temperature sensor and that's why we always quote specific controls, which we're going to get into later while why we do that with specific types of installations. If this were a concrete job or a paver job, you don't have to worry about pavers getting too warm. You don't have to worry about concrete getting too warm. The only thing that you would do is if you were a paver job or a concrete job in one of the states that says you have to have something sensing the temperature of the slab, because there are some states that have that in their Electrical Code because they don't want a slab to get too hot if it gets too hot. There's no need to keep heating it. Right so you want to mitigate the amount of power that is being used. So usually that's an electrical part of a building code. So if you are building, I believe in New York, Rhode island, maybe Washington state, but I don't remember exactly. There are certain places that say you have to keep track of your slab temperature and just let us know that ahead of time. We'll automate like, but automatically. We'll in certain states that you have to do this. But sometimes people buy systems with his second home instead of where they primary reside. So their address that we would be their home address as opposed to the address it's going into. So that's where you need to make sure that you keep track of that. What's great about this installation plan is we get this question all the time. How much power does it take? How many breakers do I need? What kind of breakers do I need? How much power does this use? All that information is right down here in the lower right hand corner. It may or may not be visible to you, but it it tells you what controls are going to be used. It's going to tell you what your total amperage is. It's going to tell you how many breakers you need and what that size of those breakers are. So all of that information is figured out for you. You don't have to do that yourself. One thing people go is they try to figure out what size match should I put here? What should they put there? I don't know how this is going to fit. What do I do instead of sitting there trying to figure it out? Just give us the dimensions. And we'll tell you. So it's very, very important to do that. And we're here to help you. So that's the thing, to take advantage of our experience. So that's all the information that's included down here. And you'll also get an electrical plan for your electrician and go, here you go. This is what we need. Do I have this or not? So that's what this smart plan is doing for you, besides just showing you how to lay it out. Awesome So kind of talking like we started already about asphalt installations. We have a really good cross-section here that's going to show each of the layers for an asphalt install. So Scott, can you kind of tell us what we're looking at here? Yes, this installation requires two layers of asphalt. One of the first questions we always get from people doing asphalt is, can I put the cables on the gravel and then put one layer of asphalt over the top? And the answer to that is no, because gravel is not something to depend on to protect it. So you need to put down a base coat or a binder coat. Some people call it a down that's 2 inches thick, and then you use a machine to lay that out. And then you can steamroll it and get your two inch, then lay the product on top of it and then come back with asphalt, put over the top. And that needs to be, at least by code, an inch and a half. But we also suggest a 2 inch layer of asphalt on the top. So if you're thinking about doing one three inch, people love this. Now one 3 inch layer instead of two layers. It needs to be two layers. So we get that question all the time. So I just wanted to make sure that we brought that up right away. Yes, absolutely. So starting with that foundation, obviously the system is really only going to be as good as what it is laid out. So you want to start with a gravel layer that is at least 4 to 8 inches thick and is spread out very evenly to create that base layer so that the asphalt has something very secure and very even to sit on. If you're going to have an area that's going to be very high traffic, especially for things like commercial installations, stuff like that, you'd probably want to be looking at even bringing that gravel layer up to about 12 inches thick. And you can see they're using a paving machine here. That's OK. Because we're putting down the binder code. Exactly Yes. So that binder called that base code should be at least 2 inches thick. And then that top coat that we had talked about earlier, or the top layer, rather, it should be at least an inch and a half. But you really don't want it more than 2 inches. So you want to be a little bit careful with that top coat to make sure that you're getting the thickness that you need. Can you kind of tell us, Scott, about, you know, whether or not we should be using paving machines? Yeah, paving machines don't go over the top. But we're showing you here how to get that asphalt in a machine on top of the product without carrying it and wheelbarrows. So what you do is you can see here the binding, the binder code is down here and the heavy equipment is going on the binder coat and dumping asphalt over the top that's worked by hand and then a roller over the top. You can use rolling machines, that sort of stuff over the top, but you can't have a paver machine that sits down and starts dragging across because you will completely destroy the wires. So what's done here is the binder code is done. And then we have all of these cuts and turns done like in the plan. So if you take a look up here at that plan that we did, all of these panels are already cut and placed on the side of the driveway. So these sections are all cut. We've cut them. Here's a 15 foot run, then here's a four foot run. These panels are all cut. There is a 20 foot run, 20 foot run, 20 foot run. And then these are cuts and turns. These are all done ahead of time. So as the machines come along, you drag them in place, lay them down, the machine pours asphalt over the top, and the person uses the asphalt over the top. And then the machine comes in and then you lay more down. The machine comes in, dumps more down on top of it, and you work your way back using the paved area that you've already got to have the equipment go back and forth on. You never, ever want to run your equipment over the cable. Never, ever run over the cable. Yes definitely something we want to hammer home. So those are the layers that you're going to have. And that's how to get that top layer of asphalt on to the top. Yes and then from there. So once that base layer is down, that's when you'll lay out your snow melting of that. So like you said, Scott, obviously these were already pre-cut kind of pre to make sure that it's a very simple layout. They can just more or less walk it across the base coat. Right the last thing and asphalt company wants to do is to wait for you to do cuts and turns or to lay out loose cable. They don't have the time. The asphalt is going to go bad in the truck if they don't have a heated truck. So you have to get it there and get it done. So that's why you have all this done ahead of time. So we're going to be talking about other stuff you need to have done ahead of time to make sure that you're not wasting asphalt people's time or the concrete people's time, because concrete usually has more than just your particular driveway in the truck. They've got to go somewhere else with what's left. So a lot of times that time is money to them and they will not wait for you to do that. So you need to make sure that you test this before you put it in. The electrician should be here while it's being installed, doing tests all the time. So your electrician is not just going to show up the day of the installation and go up. Looks good to me and then leave. They're going to be there ahead of time. They're going to be there a couple of days before they're going to be there During the entire day while they're working over the top of the cable. It's going to be the electricians job to make sure that the cable doesn't get harmed and they're going to be testing it the whole time. So if you're thinking about who do I need to have here on this day, you need to have the asphalt people. You need to cut to do your cuts and turns ahead of time. And you need to make sure your electrician has all of their work done, like has the conduit already cut and bent before these asphalt people show up, you need to make sure the cable never, ever comes out of the side of the driveway into the dirt. It you'll never, ever see it because it always has to be protected by conduit. The national electric code says 3/4 inch rigid conduit, but a lot of local people, you know, local codes differ all over the place. We there's no way we can keep track of 4,000 different codes. We just can't do it. But the electricians job is to make sure that the conduit he's using or she is to code, and also that it stubs into the top layer of the asphalt because the cable can't see the air. The non heating lead must travel in conduit even as it exits the slab. So you're not going to have any cable anywhere that you're going to be able to see. Now, if you look at this drawing or this picture, you can see the green cable is the heating cable. That cable is always covered. You never, ever cover it. But you have the heating cable, then you have a splice and then you have a non heating wire that goes to the junction box and that non heating lead is only 20 feet long. So that's the part that leaves the slab and goes into the junction box. Your junction boxes have to be within 20 feet because that's where the cable is only long enough to get from that area to the junction box. And you can see that junction boxes right here at the bottom of the picture. That's where this 20 foot lead is going to run through the wall in conduit up to this box. And that's where your connection is going to be made to the power coming from the house. So you have to keep that in mind. You only have 20 feet of cold lead, non heating lead. That part needs to be protected in conduit going into a junction box. You can never, ever splice it together under the asphalt. That's against code and extraordinarily bad idea. So your job is to get that wire into that junction box, and that's how you get your connections made. So you want to watch out for that. The part that goes from the non heating lead to the heating wire is called the splice. And that splice, you cannot bend it because that's the part where they're terminated together. That's where they're joined. The wires are mechanically fastened, the non heating wires to the heating wires. If you bend that, you're going to break that connection and now you're going to have the driveway that doesn't work, or at least that part. So those are just some of the things that you're going to look out for when you're doing your installation in this asphalt. And once again, since this is asphalt, we also have to have that over temperature sensor embedded in that layer of asphalt. And that wire is long enough to get back to the control in the House. So it needs to get to its own junction box via its own conduit, so it can then be extended from that junction box to the house by the electrician. So low voltage wires can never, ever go in the same conduit as high voltage wires. So I've just gone through the list of the things that the mistakes that people make quite often, and that's why we wanted to address them here. So very, very important. But what I love is this picture right here. Yes, this is a great one. So this is actually showing the finished asphalt surface once that is installed between those two layers. So it's going to, you know, obviously heat that top layer, get that snow and ice melting efficiently and then it'll drain right down into that drain. Right exactly. And it looks fantastic, too. So here you can see before we get to the final version, is the product laid out? And this is as far as we went because we needed to get the dump in there to dump the asphalt over the top. So the people could work with it while they're doing that. One thing or a couple of things you want to do when you're using your asphalt tools is to remember you can't just use them like you're used to because there's electric heating cable inside there. So what you want to do is you want to use the rake turned upside down. Instead of raking it like this with your asphalt rake, you want it turned upside down so you can move it around as you need. Also, you want to put duct tape on your shovels because the last thing you want to do is have somebody with a shovel going like that and going right into the cable. I've fixed those systems before, so that's why I know. Please don't do that. So those are a couple of the things that you can work on. Not walking on the factory splices, not bending the factory splices to get them in the conduit. The factory splice can never, ever go in the conduit. It has to be in the asphalt or in the concrete or under the pavers. It cannot be in the conduit because it can overheat and fail. So those are just some things. Those are the common things that we talk to people about in our pre meetings. You know, the pre we use we sometimes have meetings with the electrician and the contractor ahead of time to go over this stuff and say, here's what you need to do, here's what you need to make sure you don't do. And here are the things that you need to look out for. So that's the kind of service we get here ahead of time. We will actually talk this through beforehand with whoever is going to be doing this job for you will do it ahead of time. And that way we'll get the questions answered. And then having you out there going, Oh no, what do we do now? So that's what it's going to look like. While you're doing your installation. You can see the mats over here on the left side. There are cut and they're sized. They're ready to go as soon as that area becomes available to pour asphalt over the top. Yes, absolutely. So looking at a concrete installation, the cross-section is going to look a little bit different for this one. So we're starting again with that compacted gravel base between 4 and 12 inches. And then from there, Scott, can you tell us what we're looking at here? Well, what you want to do, and I think this might align with the second or the third question we had from Chip D. That is, How's the feedback been from contractors of concrete? And I've talked to these guys directly, and the one thing they say is we don't really have to worry about anything. Only thing you have to tell us is that you're going to need to have sub 3/4 inch aggregate in the concrete, which means the rocks in the mix of the concrete need to be smaller than 3/4 of an inch because the product that we sell the, the, the, the mesh, the heating wire on mesh, those mesh little squares are about an inch and 1/4. So that 3/4 inch aggregate will flow right through. So another common mistake we see are people not getting the cable into the middle of the port. There's two kinds of applause. You can do. There's a 2-step and a single step. But what we're showing you here is a single step, because it's the easiest and the fastest way to do it. What you do is you go out there ahead of time. Your electrician's going to help you with this. You're going to attach the you're going to put concrete blocks or top hats or chairs, whatever the wording that you're asked that your concrete people do, that is going to be used to prop up the Rebar. If you don't have Rebar, you can use 10 gauge a welded fencing. And that is a good stiff. And you can buy that in big roles at the big box stores are the people that do that sell fencing. It's the 10 gauge stuff. And what you want to do is you want to have that has to be stiff enough. So when you walk across it, the chairs are going to hold that up. And that's what's going to keep your heating cable in the middle of the poor. You don't want your heating cable to do this to be at the bottom because then it's too far away from the top. So if you have four inches of concrete, you want the wire right in the middle of it. And the only way to do that is to have your compacted gravel, then use concrete blocks or debris. A lot of people just use debris from the worksite because there's a lot of rocks and stuff that you can use to prop that up. But you have to remember to prop it up into the middle of the poor. And then you also have to tell that concrete guy to make sure that it's 3/4 inch sub sub, 3/4 inch aggregate sort of flow through as it goes. If you don't do that and they put large rocks, what it's going to do is it's going to act like a strainer and all the rocks are going to be at the top and all the liquid concrete is going to be at the bottom, which is going to make it a very unstable installation. So very, very important, you want to make sure that wires in the middle, the poor and the fastest way to do that is one fell swoop, get that stuff put in and there's support of the concrete right over the top. Awesome yeah, those are all some really good tips. And I really like the point of, you know, for the concrete contractors, it doesn't tend to be an especially difficult installation as long as they are aware of it going into it and what needs to be done from their end. It tends to be pretty simple. Yeah, all they have to do is they want to mark. A lot of people will take construction flags, those purple. I mean, those are orange flags that are little pieces of wire and they stick them into the ground. You see them all over the place when they mark the locations of utilities, when you know where your gas lines are and that sort of stuff, they'll take some of those. And wherever the factory splice ends up, they'll put one there. So they know they can tell. The people don't walk around here because when the concrete starts flowing, you're going to be walking around, you're not going to remember what's underneath. So what you do is you put those construction flags wherever there's a factory splice because that's going to tell them, don't walk here. And then as they work around it and finish the concrete, they can then pull them out and then finish the concrete without ever stepping on the splices. It's very, very important to know that. Yes, absolutely. So looking at the Foundation for a concrete driveway installation, so can you kind of tell us, Scott, I know we talked about on the top hats or, you know, concrete blocks. Can you tell us what they're looking at here? Well, they this is a job that I did. And I got out there and we had found that the wire had been attached to a chicken wire. The heating cable had been attached to chicken wire, which is not what you want to do. You don't want to do that. So at that point, I go, OK, here's what we have to do. We can't lay this out and put concrete over it. We need to do a 2-step install here because it's just not resilient enough. You can't walk over it. Fortunately, it was just a walkway, so you can work over it from each side and not have to walk down the middle of the walkway. So what we did here is we did a 2-step install. So you can see we've got some Rebar there and some bricks to try to prop it up. But the thing is, with the chicken wire, it's just not resilient enough. So we had to change the plan on the fly. And that's going to happen to you. You're going to run into things that no one has planned for. I found out there that they use thousands and thousands of cable ties to hold this wire onto the chicken wire. So I couldn't just say, OK, we're going to cut these all off and start over again because it took them like three days to do it. So we did the best that we could. And what we did then is we did the 2-step poor. I did mention using zip ties, make sure that you use plastic zip ties. Don't use those metal wire devices that are used to join pieces of Rebar. You don't want to do that because you don't want to compress the wire. Just use a plastic, pull it so it's tight and holds it in place. You don't have to crank on it because you don't want to compress that wire and cause a short so plastic zip ties. Make sure you get it, propped it into the middle of the poor. And you can see here on this picture, we kind of did it old school a couple of ways. You can see the first paw has been put here and the first paw. And the first port is still over here uncovered. So on this side is just the first paw of the two inches of concrete. This side has two inches of concrete, but we've laid the cables out over the top of it. And now we'll come back and we'll put another 2 inches over this area here. And that will finish it. So that's the 2-step where you put the concrete, you lay the product on top of it, then you pour more concrete on it as you go. This side still doesn't have the cable on it yet. And also, we did the old school way of doing an expansion joint, which is either to use in the old, old days, used a cardboard felt type device that is put between the two pairs of concrete that actually keep them separated. That's an expansion joint that allows them to expand and contract without pushing on the other one. It goes like this and you don't have to worry about it breaking up the edges because it's not hitting anything hard. It's hitting it's hitting a felt board. Well, what a lot of people do now is they just cut that with a concrete saw and you can do it either way. But the last thing you want to do is you don't want to be taking the concrete sore over here because you will cut through 15 or 20 runs of cable. And that's the last thing you want to do. That's why we show on concrete jobs. That's why we show expansion joints, because you don't go through expansion joints. So that's where this case would be. We either just poured concrete and came back and cut through here or we put the felt board insulation between them and then that is what gives you the expansion joint there. So we did 3 inch spacing on this, two to 3 inches below the surface. The national electric code requires at least an inch and a half deep. That's by code of the National code. So that's what you're looking for. Those are the things you're going to be doing in that right here with concrete is kind of like the asphalt job we did. This is the 2-step port. And just to contrast and rehash, this is the single step port where you prop it up and just pour the concrete through it. Awesome and look at that. That's the finished surface of that concrete. So we touched on this already, the difference between the 1 and two stage pause. Is there anything that you need to go for a little bit more in depth there? Yeah, this joint that we're showing here is not an expansion joint. This is just simply a safety joint or whatever it's called a controlled joint. Different it's called different things In different places. But it control joint is where you simply because we know the wires at least 2 inches below the surface, they'll cut an inch along the top and that will encourage it to crack there. And you can run cable through these types of control joints, but you can't run them through expansion joints. So that's the joint that you're seeing here. Great information. Thank you. And I'm looking at a paver installed, so we have a few different cross-sections here showing a couple different examples. So this is starting out with a paver layer paver installation with finished mortar or sand and then the snow melting map. So can you kind of tell us, Scott, what we're looking at here? Yeah, this is a Matt Schaub because you can see the snow melting that has tape that holds the cable to the mats or to the rolls. And this is the fastest way to install this product with pavers is to use the mesh. Also, what you can do is you can use the mesh actually to hold it in place while you're installing it. Or if you're using loose cable, you can use another product that we're going to talk about here and tie these off, tie these wires to the subframe, either once again, that 10 gauge fencing or the stuff that we're going to be talking about here in a minute. But what you want to do is when you're laying this out, this is just a normal paper job, pretty much, except that you have wires resting between the crushed gravel and the sand that you're using. One thing to remember when you're doing a paver install is never, ever sit the paver on the cable. The paver should be sitting on sand. So that's where you're going to have a 1 inch or an inch and a half layer that is going to encompass the cable. It's going to sit the cable is going to sit inside of it, because you can't make the sand sit on top. It's going to be it's going to go around it. Right so in that layer that the cables are in, it should be about an inch to an inch and a half. If you're doing tire tracks where you want to do just the tire track coverage to get you in and out of your garage, you're going to need to use mortar to hold these pavers in place. And the people will. Why do I need to use mortar to hold these? It's so much more expensive. Well, the problem is that these areas, if you're doing just the tire tracks, not the entire parking, not the entire driveway, but if you're just using that, the part directly over the cables will freeze and thaw, freeze and thaw, freeze and thaw more than the areas that are not covered by heaters. So that is the area that's going to tend to sink. As you go along like gravel does, as it gets worn away, it'll sink. Well, the way to keep it from sinking is to use the mortar across the entire width of the driveway. And now you've got something firm that won't wear away and will keep the cables where they need to be. So if you're going to do tire tracks, you're going to need to do that mortar so that an inch and a half or inch a mortar, then you're still going to need to use your sand that you normally do to use the Earth to set the pavers. So when it comes to these types of install snowmelt Mance are faster just because they're a little bit more expensive. And you're going to talk about the pricing about that a little bit. Here we can see the stuff we were talking about and that's the attachment grid. And this attachment grid is, is, is like reinforced polypropylene that's reinforced to be very strong in multiple directions. So what you do is you lay this out and you tag it down in the corners to make sure it's nice and taut, and then you can attach the cable to it. And once you get the cable attached to it, you can come back, you can roll it back up and put it over somewhere else if you want to. But the cable is going to be tied to this. So the snow mode attachment grid is pretty much what you're going to use if you're using cable. And that's what we see here. The cables, the attachment grid and the plastic tie wraps that you're using to set those into place and to keep them still. And then sand. If you're doing an entire driveway or walkway or mortar with sand, if you're doing tire tracks. Awesome So the foundation for pavers, again, obviously, your foundation is going to be a huge part of the installation because it's what you're going to have the entire thing based on. So you'll see in this picture that there is that gravel layer, that base layer that spread out before the actual snow melting system is installed. And the papers are just off to the side until we have all that, you know, the base layer down, the heating system down and that sand or mortar. And then obviously we discussed the attachment grid. These come in 3 foot by 50 foot widths or sizes, I guess I should say, and the grid is 1 inch by 1 inch. So it allows for that cable installation to be done very quickly and to help maintain proper depth, depth and spacing. Yeah and what you can do is you can use stakes to hold this in place. You really not concrete bolts. The bolts and washers really are needed. That is the bolts and washers or screws and washers are used on stairs. So we're going to see that a little bit later. But if you're going to be putting this in place over gravel, you can just use those lawn stakes or, you know, that you use to secure landscaping materials there. So that's going to help you. And the great thing is they're 1 inch squares, so that helps you do 3 inch spacing really easily. You just attach it to one, then go up to 3 inches and go across and attach and go across like that. So the spacing on the mat really, really helps. Absolutely so when using the snow melting mats, you're going to want to lay them out according to your smart plan. Again, that will provide to you. Can you kind of tell us what we're looking at here with that? So the snake in the picture. Yeah, that's just holding it in place while you pull it tight and then lay it down. And then you can put areas you can put spikes, different places to hold it down. But really, once it's held in place, you just keep a couple at the beginning of the run and a couple at the end, and that'll hold it tight enough so you can start putting your sand and mortar over the top because you're not really going to be tugging on it a lot, but that will help you secure it in place while you're doing that. So you're going to once again, your electricians going to need to be here, even though you're doing pavers, your electricians going to need to be here to do testing during the installation. So it's very, very important that you do that because you don't want any problems as you're doing your install. Absolutely so from here. Well, this is a good picture also showing that grid and also metal mesh is almost the word I use, which is not accurate. So that grid there, can you kind of tell us what we're looking at with this? Yeah, here we can see those washers and the screws that are holding the mesh in place on a stairway. And then you're using cable ties, the plastic ones, to hold the wires at the specified distance apart, to hold it there. And then that's going to allow you to put mortar over the top of it and layer your limestone caps or whatever you're going to be using on the stairs. Limestone caps is very, very popular with snow melting because you can get this all put in, put mortar in, set it, and it looks really nice. And you'll never, ever know that electric heating wires under there. But you have to be able to hold it in place. And the best way to do that is with this polypropylene mat and hold it in place with the screws and the washers and then attaching the cable to it. Perfect and then from there, once those that heating element is installed and laid out, then you would do a layer of sand or a layer of that mortar. So can you kind of give us some tips and tricks on that? Well, the board, as you know, is to get you a nice flat surface. So they're going to be doing that there, be moving it around. Once again, the most important part here is to get it flat. And the second well, probably the most important thing is make sure that the pavers aren't sitting on the heating table, because people always say, well, what's the big deal about that? Well, as you go along, you know, if you've ever had paving or pavers put in your house, you know, eventually two or three years later, a couple of them may sink a little bit. And the last thing you want them to do is sink and then hit on the cable, because every time you step on it, it does this as the bottom, you know, looking for bottom, and instead it's suspended on the cable. So now all of a sudden, your pavers on the cable, and every time you step on it or roll something across it, you're now hitting the paper onto the cable. So you don't want that. So you're going to use this to get it nice and flat, and you're going to use it to make sure that you have at least a half an inch between the cable and the paver when you set it down, because you have to come back to it. Once you're done. Yes, absolutely. And then laying out the pavers on that sand or water surface. So, again, just being really careful. You want anybody who's working on this job to be aware of the fact that there is going to be a heating system beneath the surface and to take a little bit of extra precaution. So make sure that you're not, you know, laying the pavers directly on and that snow melting cable and that you're being just a little bit extra careful to, you know, create that a little bit more with kid gloves. Right, exactly. The cable very, very resilient. You have to work at it to damage it. So we're sitting here talking about it's the most fragile thing in the world, but it's not. But it's good to keep in mind that it's there and to operate over the top of it, you know, correctly, because you don't want to be damaging that product that you just put in. Once again, you're going to have somebody here testing it as you go along. And that's what you just have to look out for when you're doing this type of install. Awesome So looking at some tips for installing a snow melting underneath pavers and really this can go for any installation, make sure that the heating cable is not at any point crossing or overlapping itself. You don't want it to be touching. You don't want it to be too close. You always want them at least 3 inches apart from each other. You'll also want to make sure that you aren't ever at any point cutting or altering the heating cable length. So these are not the kinds of things you can purchase way too much of and just end up, you know, cutting the excess or shortening it, something like that. You want to make sure that you're getting the size that you need, which is where those smart plans really come into play. Right and the minimum bend radius is 2 and 1/2 inches on this cable. So if you had to go to 2 and 1/2 inch spacing to make it fit, that's OK. You don't want to do any less than that. Two inch, 2 and 1/2 inch bend radius means that the cables can physically get no closer than 2 and 1/2 inches because of the bend at the end. Different size cables allow you to bend different amounts, and that's what the bend radius is. So 2 and 1/2 inches is your minimum of bare, bare minimum of spacing. I can't tell you the number of people that we've talked to that have done this paver installation and we designed it at 3 inch spacing and they did it at 4 inch spacing instead because no one gave them the drawing. And then the homeowner comes out and says, I have a spool of heating wire just sticking out the side of the pavers. And there's probably 100 feet of cable here or there's 50 feet of cable here. What do I do? The answer to that is have your installer come back out and take all the pavers off and install it at 3 inch spacing instead of four. Because you cannot cut the wire because it has to do with Ohm's law. And I just talked to an electrician the other day and as soon as I said that, the light bulb went off because you can't take a bunch of resistance away from something that's engaged to give you so many watts per linear foot because of the ohms value. So, you know, you have to 40 or 120 volts and you know, there's so many ohms that you're supposed to have and that will yield a certain amount of heat. If you take a bunch of resistance away, your current's going to go way up. So as the resistance goes down, I'm keeping Ohm's law as simple as possible. If you start removing resistance, which means cutting wire more and more and more and more wire amperage goes like this. Up, up, up, up, up, up, up. As the length of the cable gets shorter and eventually it gets so hot that it melts and it fails. That's why you can't just cut these in half. Oh, I'm done. I've got 50 feet extra. I'm just going to cut it off, and then we'll be good to go. Unfortunately, that's not the case. So with pavers, the good thing is you can pull all them back up and make the space. Or you can add you can say, I'm going to give you two choices. You can either come back and do it correctly or you can give me another free area here that you can get rid of all the cable you didn't use. Well, you know what the answer to that. The paper's going to tell you, OK, we're not going to give anything free. Welcome back. We'll install it correctly. So those are the kind of things you have to watch out for. You can never, ever cut the hidden cable and you should never, ever see the heating cable or the non heating lead, ever. It should never be visible. It should either be under the pavers or in conduit sticking out the side, going into a junction box. So those are the things at once again, every single day we get these questions. So that's why we're doing these webinars is to go, oh, I remember that guy in the red shirt, he wouldn't shut up. But he did tell me that I can't cut the cable, so at least we got something positive there. And that's all that really matters, right? So talking about controls and different sensors that we offer. So when you look at your electrical work, well, I should say when you look at your smart plan, you'll see that we have the electrical requirements listed out for you. So this way you can determine well before making any purchases or doing any wiring that you have enough space in your breaker box. That's going to always be one of the first things you want to look out for. Yeah so if we take a look at this breaker box, it shows that we have four possible spaces that we can use here. Some people will call us, they'll have no spaces in their breaker box. So if you have zero spaces in your breaker box, you're probably going to need to get an additional service. And a lot of people don't want to go to that expense. So if you have a breaker box that's full and you don't want to get another service, you're probably not going to have you're not going to have enough power to do an installation. You figure these a lot of these installations are right around 50 watts per square foot. That's why some people don't heat entire driveways. They do just the tire tracks 2 feet by 30 feet on each size, two sets as you go, you know, one for each wheel in and out. And that will save you 60% of your electric usage if you just heat, you know, 30% or 40% of the driveway instead of all of it. So first step, if you're interested in getting a heating product for your driveway, is to look in your breaker box first, see what you have, and go, hey, I've got 80 amps to work with. I've got 40 amps to work with, I've got 120, I've got 200. It's good to know what you have because then you can say, we're going to give you a drawing. And the drawing going to say you need 88 amps. Oh, I have 100. So I'm good. So then we, we can proceed. But if you have a job that's 88 amps and you only have two spaces and there's 40 amps available. You're not going to get it done. So that's why the smart plan is so important. Just give us the dimensions of the area. And we'll figure it all out for you. But you have to have electricity to be able to do it. Yes, absolutely. I think that's something that is often overlooked or not thought about, and it's definitely something you want to consider at the very beginning of the project. Right so our smelting controls, as you can see. We have a lot of different options available. And the first thing you'll want to do is pick between automatic or manual controls. So all of our automatic controls are going to have a way or feature to detect the temperature and the moisture, any kind of precipitation that's falling so that the system will start to warm up as soon as there is any kind of snow. Whereas any kind of manual control, you would need to keep up with that yourself. People love Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi is awesome. I love Wi-Fi. However, the Wi-Fi switch is simply a way to take your phone and turn it on and take your phone and turn it off. So it's a manual switch, just like the timer is. Now, if you're well versed in TFT, then you can program it to when you're can have an app that works with the Wi-Fi Switch and maybe you can have the system turn on when your Weather Service that you have on your phone says it's snowing. So it'll automatically stay on. Then you can have it stay on for two hours after it's done snowing because you never, ever want it to stop. Immediately after it stops snowing, you have to melt what's left. Otherwise, it's going to turn to Black ice. So instead of dealing with Wi-Fi and the timer is simply a turn it and then, you know, it'll heat until it's done heating until the time is up. All these other controls are automatic where you shouldn't 99% of the time, unless you get a huge snowstorm, you might have to manually turn it on a couple of times to help clear, you know, the two or three feet of snow. That is about the only time you're ever going to have to interact with these controls down here. So these are all automatic and the zone breaker. Well, let's talk about the zone breaker real quick. The zone breaker allows you to hit an area that's bigger than you have power for. So let's say that you have a gigantic driveway and that gigantic driveway takes 200 amps and you've only got 50 amps. What you can do is you can split that into four pieces. One, two, three, four. And what happens is that zone breaker will turn on the power to zone 1 and then it'll turn it off. Then immediately, just a couple seconds later, it'll turn on zone 2 and let it run for a while and then turn zone 2 off and then turn zone 3 on and then turn it off and then turn zone 4 on a couple of seconds later. That way you're heating the driveway, but no two sections are on the same time because we have two sections on at the same time. You're going to blow your fuses or your breakers. So that's why it turns on off. Then on off. It doesn't go on, on, on, off. It doesn't do that. It's on off, on, off, on, off and on, off. The more sections you have, the longer it will take to melt. There is no way around it. Multiple zones, a multi zone heater like this is a compromise. It's allowing you to heat a bigger area than you really have rights to heat. So to deal with that, you have to go with. The fact is it's going it could take me three or four times longer to melt everything because it's one section on at a time and you have to wait for it to go through that progress. But it will let you heat a bigger area than you have power for. And that's what the zone breaker is for. It's allowing you to heat an area that you don't have enough power to heat. By doing sections individually in rotation. So that's what that is. And a lot of people ask, well, how does it know it's snowing? How does it know it's wet? How does it know it's cold? That's done with an aerial sensor. So the aerial sensor works with this. This this. So these controls use the aerial sensor. This value control is a sensor and a control all in one. The Wi-Fi is manual. The timer is manual. But the slab sensor that you see here is used with this economy controller. This economy controller simply takes the material, the data from the slab itself, and that's where it's going to get its information from. So you have once again, these units. No, not automatic. Not automatic. Automatic, automatic, automatic. Automatic, automatic. So a lot of people say, when is it going to kick in? Well, since most controllers use this sensor, this sensor, if you look at the top, is a word that I love to dazzle people with. Smoke and mirrors is an inner digital heated grid, which means there's a grid here and a grid here. They never touch what makes them touches water. When water gets on the top of that, it completes the circuit. It completes that circuit to send power through. So that's how it knows that it's wet. And then once it's wet, it says, is it above 38 degrees or is it below 38 degrees? If it's above 38 degrees, I'm not doing anything. I'm just going to get somebody to sit here and get rained on. But if it's 38 or 37 degrees or less, it'll go, hey, it's raining or snowing and it's below 38 degrees. Time to turn the system on and then the system will turn on. Awesome and I love these diagrams, the sensor placement diagrams, kind of showing you how you want to start thinking about where your sensor should be located. And these are a little complicated looking, Scott. So can you kind of tell us what we're thinking about here? As ray Kroc from McDonalds said, Christ kiss, keep it simple. So what you want to do is keep it simple by thinking. I need to put the sensor where it snows every single time, and that is never right up against the side of the house. Because if you ever go out and look at the side of the house where when it snows, sometimes there's a foot perimeter depending on how much overhang you have. But sometimes there's a foot around the house that never gets snowed on. That's the last place you want to put a sensor because it's not going to get snow. It has to be someplace where it always gets snow away from the wall of the house, up somewhere where vandals can't get at it. But you have to be able to clean that Interdigital lighted grid at the top because it's warm. And when it's warm, birds love to sit on that. And birds, when they love sitting on things, sometimes leave some gift cards behind. And those gift cards need to be cleaned and you need to get rid of that mess that sometimes can be associated with birds. So you want to clean that every year. So you have to put it somewhere where you can get at it but cannot be vandalized. And let's say last thing. Let's say you put your sensor here. And you put it next to a shrub and they're the same height. This year. Or maybe the shrubs down here next year, the shrub is going to be here next year, the shrubs here next year next year. And all of a sudden, the snow never, ever gets to the sensor because it's now buried under the shrubs. So it can't sit next to a shrub. It needs to be somewhere where the shrub is not going to grow and cover it. So that's some things you want to do where always hits the snow, always sets, and somewhere that can't be vandalized, somewhere where it can be cleaned, and somewhere where you can get at it. That's the most important thing. Awesome and then our ever famous spaghetti bowl, as he likes to call it. Oh, you're going to want all of those cold leads. Those 20 foot leads to be routed through. So all splices or extensions, anything that needs to be done should be made in these junction boxes and these should be accessible. So you'll want them to be somewhere where you can reach them relatively easily and get to those splices, as well as making sure that if it's going to be outdoors, that it is weatherproof and rated for outdoor use. Right and you have to be able to get at them. So that's part of the National Electric Code. They need to be accessible, which means you can't hide them. You can't put 3 inches of dirt over the top and just say, oh, I don't like the looks of him. Well, you know, you have a nice dry driveway. The one of the small prices you're going have to pay is that you're going to see this box somewhere. And usually you can put it in the side of the wall. So you can people don't really notice it, but you can get at it, but you have to be able to get at those places in case you ever have to do any sort of troubleshooting or anything like that. Now, you don't have to deal with all the spaghetti hanging out everywhere because you can trim it to whatever your local code requires. Either you have to have 8 incahes of wire available in that box or 12 inches, whatever that rule is. They'll tell you how much has to be available sticking up to make your connections to you don't want any more of that, so just cut it off to whatever length, length that is. And now you have a bunch of connections inside this thing looking like a spaghetti Bowl that you just need to make connections for. And that's what there is going on here. There's a conduit that runs from this box over to the house, and that's where the power is coming from the house over to this junction box and connecting to the product in the driveway. Awesome and then I love this drawing kind of showing all of the different aspects of the snow melting system that are going to come into play. So it really gives you a good idea of, you know, kind of an overview of what you'll be working with. So can you kind of walk us through this? Scot exactly what you'd be looking at. Yeah, this high, your sensors are outside obviously, because if you install them indoors, your system will never turn on, but you'll never spend any money on electricity then either. You just went through the activity of putting snowmelt again in your driveway. That'll never turn on. And that's kind of counterproductive. But the high temperature sensor is going to be a high limit. High temperature limit sensor is going to be especially used for asphalt jobs. And that is going to be used with this control right here. The premium control is what you're going to be getting with asphalt because it's the one that uses that over temperature sensor. So you have that over a temperature sensor here you have the aerial sensor and it's outdoors problems we see with people that do this installation. They want they get greedy and they say, I'm going to take this wire and I'm going to run it to this junction box. And then I'm going to run it here and then I'm going to run it over here. You can't do that. Your induction will kill that signal from the low voltage. Also, it's against code to run low voltage wire in the same conduit as high voltage wire. So you can't do that. These will have their own individual conduits to get to the control. Notice the controls indoors. Also notice that the relay panel is indoors. The relay panels we sell are NEMA one relay panels that must be mounted indoors. They're not NEMA three xt or not NEMA four that go outside. They are NEMA one. So if you're in a situation where you have to install the relay panel outdoors, you're going to need to source anima 3x or a four, whatever your local code requires. Mounted outdoors. And then put our relay panel inside of it because our relay panel cannot be exposed to the elements. It's not waterproof. So you can see these parts are all here and look at our connections. Our heater mats, multiple mats can be connected in a junction box, but notice there's one to 3 mats. There's also 1 to 3 feeds to this juncture box, not one really big heavy duty, you know, to gauge wire running there. It's individual runs through conduit out here to the junction box you can run one single conduit here into the slab, if you like, if it's allowed per code. So you can check that out. But these are all running here, relay panels inside the breaker panel. So what the controller is a controller is just it's telling the switch, which is the relay to turn on and off. So power is always going to the relay panel. Power is always being supplied by gfa, EP breakers, ground fault equipment protection or GFP ground fault protection equipment. And it is always going to the relay panel. This controller just goes turn on, turn off, turn on, turn off by the Signal it gets from the aerial mounted sensor. So that's it. That's the view from 30,000 feet above trying to make it to scientific, but just kind of how the pieces work together. Now, we did have a question. Go ahead and ask any questions you have. Now is a good time to do that, so start typing. But we did have a question that was right up your alley, Lynn. What's the material cost per square feet for this product? Yeah so honestly, it will vary quite a bit because we do offer things like volume discounts and stuff like that. So obviously the more that you're purchasing the cheaper per square foot. It will be. But looking at the actual cables themselves, you're usually anywhere from 8 to 16 or 8 to $16 a square foot. And first no multi mass, you're usually closer to $10 to $20 a square foot and US pricing. Right and Giancarlo asks, can you do permeable pavers? And the answer to that is Yes. Permeable pavers have a different cross section that we can send you for that because it involves the water going through notice in all of our presentation materials, we do not mention stone dust. Stay away from stone dust for doing pavers because it's a bad, bad subject. Because stone dust. Can eventually, you have a mixture of fines as what they call different sizes. So what happens is you get some sizes or a little bit bigger with really, really powdery stuff. The really, really powdery stuff fills the gaps between those larger pieces. So the water never, never lets the water go through. It just kind of runs off. And then as it gets wet, it can explained and contract it freezes and it so stone dust is we used it a little while ago, but the paver, one of the paver associations said, you know, you really should stay away from it because it can cause the pavers to heave. And that's the last thing that you want. So stay away from stone dust. Absolutely mark asks, how much energy do you lose going into the base layer versus up to the pavers? Well, that's another great question. And it deals with permeable pavers because permeable pavers, you have to have bigger chunks of rocks that don't allow that allows the water to go through. So you need to let that water. That's what permeable means. Well, the best transmission of heat is no air. So you that's why the best transmission of heat is concrete. Second best is asphalt. And the third is pavers because permeable pavers have a lot of air space between those rocks that kind of keeps the heat from getting to the top. So you get more energy efficiency with concrete than you would pavers. But maybe Mark might be going down the road of like with hydroponic systems is when you really have to worry about losing efficiency because as soon as the water leaves the boiler, the temperature starts to drop and as soon as it hits the cold pavement, it gets cold pretty quickly as it's pumped through. So the water reaching at the beginning could be 110 degrees. And when it comes out, it could be 30 degrees. Well, that leads to this area heating really well. And at the end, it's going to be cold. Well, that's where with electric, it's the same temperature at the beginning as it is at the end. It doesn't start hot and then get Colder. It's hot, hot, hot, hot all the way through. So I don't I can't tell you, mark. Exactly you're going to lose 4% by using permeable paint, permeable pavers. You're going to use lose 6% by using this. You're going to lose 12% by that because no two jobs are exactly the same. All I can do is give you a broad overview like I just did. Permeable pavers, having the most Ar content below the cable and around the cable is going to transmit the least amount of heat. But they do work because we've sold them before. So if you want a permeable paper drawing, we can send you that. It's specified by stone size at different layers. Number nine, stone here, number 20 stone here, and that sort of stuff. It's all done scientifically to get that water through and away, but still be able to heat the surface above. So great questions. Yes, for sure. Any other questions? And, you know, honestly, we have a little bit of housekeeping to do. So if anything comes up while we're chatting, we feel free to ask away again, either in that sidebar chat or at the bottom of the screen. Olivia, our fantastic assistant with these. She keeps an eye on our Facebook. Is there anything on Facebook that needs to be answered? Olivia so far so good. OK Facebook mark wanted to know if we can get a copy of the slides. Olivia, can you take care of that for him? Make sure that if we weren't emailing it to everybody that we're at least giving it to Mark. Perfect awesome. All right. So our next webinar is going to be Thursday, may 11. So next month, we're talking about installing electric towel warmers. So please be sure to join us for that. I know we have a lot of really cool new products in that front, so visit us on May 11. We also offer daily trainings, usually at least once a day, if not twice a day, often hosted by me, by Scott. Yours truly. So please feel free to join us for those anywhere from usually 10 to 15 minutes. Ask some questions on any topic. It doesn't even need to be that today's topic and just learn a little bit more about our products. And we do offer several services here at WarmlyYours. We have a measuring service. We also have remote or on site installation support. And then we also offer installation and troubleshooting for both for heating and still melting. Yeah we troubleshoot other people's stuff all the time. I will get an email in the morning, say I own this product by these other people, but they never call me back. So can you help me? There's like. Sure, we're. We're here to keep everybody's toes warm. That's the main thing. Absolutely and before the month of April, we are offering 15% off of our snow melting system. So whether you're looking at using a cable system, a map system, be sure to consider purchasing it this month so that we can get you that 15% discount and visit our website for a lot more information. I love this picture because it's tire track coverage on a really steep Hill going to someone's house up at the top of the Hill. So that's where you're going to see a lot of snow melting applications where you have a Hill that intersects with a road. This is a very important part to be able to stop before you get to the road. So even if you can't do the whole thing, the part before you get between the street and where the Hills coming down, that's where people will do that first and then work away from there. So that's just something to keep in mind to. Absolutely and we do love hearing from you. So be sure to fill out our survey once this is over. We want to make sure that we're talking about things that you want to hear about and things that you are interested in. So let us know what our next topics should be. And if you have any comments or suggestions. I keep saying we should do some on ice cream and chocolate. But they always say, no, you've got to be talking about our products. So if you like ice cream and chocolate, you want us to talk about it? I'll talk to the boss. What do you say? She'll tell us to start our own podcast. And we would. Olivia seems to agree with the ice cream idea, so I think we're all onboard. So feel free to reach out. Whatever you do, have questions or get a quote. Give us a call. She's email us at our website. However, it's easiest for you to get in contact with us. Be sure to do so. would love to hear from you and get you some warm driveways, warm for whatever you're looking for and ice cream. And ice cream. And that is all we have today. So thank you so much for joining us again. My name is Lynn. I'm joined by Scott. We had a wonderful time. Please have a lovely, safe rest of your day. And until next time, stay warm and be radiant.