Creating A Car Lane On Your Site - 2

2024 Author: Sebastian Paterson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:47

Tracks for vehicles are often made 3 m wide. In case of icing, they are an excellent skating rink, and when the ice melts - a pool. Jokes as a joke, but from day to day it is unpleasant to depend on the vagaries of the weather, and endlessly cleaning the paths is tiresome. You can make your life easier if you remember the routine of caring for the personal "highway" at the stage of laying its foundation.

Required minimum

The main rule for tracks of any scale says that the roadbed should have a slope from the center to the boundaries at the rate of 5-10 degrees per meter. This simple technique will allow melt and rainwater to be removed by gravity from the middle of the canvas and will eliminate the formation of puddles. The second stage is more difficult. To avoid flooding of flower beds and lawns, rain and melt streams from the road surface must be directed to drainage or storm sewers. Ideally, water should drain there by gravity, i.e. the network should again have a slight slope. At the intersection, and sometimes along the boundaries of the paths, along the edge of the blind area, at the entrance to the garage, at the entrance to the house, rain collectors are installed, from which water is diverted through canals outside the site. The channel network can be connected to the sewer mains. For this, standard couplings are used.

But experts advise to build a separate ditch to collect drainage and surface water, as far as possible from the sewer well, in order to avoid flooding of the sump and the emergence of the "aromatic" slurry on the surface. If rain flows are supposed to be dumped onto the relief, special Drain blocks are used. They are buried in the ground, where they accumulate water, and then in small portions they bring it into the ground.

In the retail and wholesale trade network today you can find a great variety of components for the channel network. These are steel, galvanized, and plastic (reinforced polypropylene or high density polyethylene) sections, and channels made of concrete reinforced with fiberglass. Concrete channels are respected for their increased strength, frost resistance and corrosion resistance. But the low weight of the plastic ducts simplifies their transportation and installation. Duct sections are equipped with cast iron or galvanized or stainless, steel, and plastic gratings of various shapes, but gratings with mesh holes allow water to pass through better.

If you don't need a roller

Another misfortune of our region is the sharp changes in not only seasonal, but also daily air temperature against the background of a large amount of precipitation. If frost strikes after rain or snow and rain, the paths and parking lots are covered with an ice crust.

There are three ways to deal with frost. The first - manual mechanical - is obvious, the second - automatic, with the help of heating the canvas - we will consider separately, and the third - mechanical, but, so to speak, with a foot, should be mentioned separately. It is applicable in the case when the canvas is made not continuous, but typeset. Moreover, the size of the fragments, be it slabs, tiles or paving stones, does not matter. In any places, usually in the most popular places, an elastic profile made of frost-resistant elastic rubber is laid under individual elements of the coating. Foreign manufacturers call it ShurStep and guarantee the preservation of rubber elasticity at temperatures from -60 ° C to + 60 ° C. The method of action of the device is simple: when the moving element is pressed on, the profile bends and, returning to its previous position, breaks the ice into small pieces.

The foreign product has limitations - the tiles should not be thicker than 10 mm. Therefore, their classically black ShurStep is used mainly for anti-icing on stair steps and small patios. Domestic craftsmen have guessed to use porous rubber briquettes sealed from all sides, but so far this product is rare. The obvious simplicity of the method gives room for the imagination of home craftsmen. You can use foam rubber, pieces of soft frost-resistant plastic, and trimming of tires that have served their life. It is only important not to get carried away by the thickness of the pillow, so as not to stumble when walking.

Clearing the future

From snow slurry and ice, the car paths are successfully relieved by the internal electric heating systems. Due to their high cost, these systems have not yet become widespread in our country, but they deserve consideration as the most comfortable systems. They can be arranged according to the principle of electric "warm floors": a heating cable is embedded in the cement mortar of the base, protected from freezing by a special casing made of heat and waterproof materials. The heating cable must have high mechanical strength, flexibility, ductility, moisture resistance, fire safety, and be characterized by a wide range of operating temperatures (-40 … + 90 ° C).

The anti-icing system is connected to a 220 or 380 V power grid. The safety of its operation is ensured by a residual current device (RCD) or a differential automatic device. This point is very important, because at the moment the self-regulating cable is turned on, inrush currents appear, the power of which is three or more times higher than the power of the rated currents.

To avoid overloads, the ballast is complemented by a time relay, thanks to which the heating cable is switched on in stages. Installation of any anti-icing systems is difficult, therefore, it should be carried out only by specialized organizations that are able to provide a long-term warranty for electrical equipment and installation and carry out post-warranty service - control inspections and preventive maintenance of the system should be carried out at least once a quarter, and periodic tests - twice a year (in spring and in the fall).

The system of electric heating of tracks is not a cheap pleasure for a foreign consumer, but it enjoys steady popularity, since improved cables no longer require high power, which allows achieving significant savings in operating costs. The paths connecting the main building and annexes connected by a common heating network can also be heated by the pipeline laid under them. However, in order to prevent pipeline breaks due to freezing, it is recommended to lay a redundant cable system. And in order for the heat to get exactly to the path, and not to the ground under it and around it, the pipe must be closed on three sides with thermal insulation, and only then covered with sand. It turns out that the "sandwich" of the base under such tracks must have an additional layer.

Many potential customers of ready-made "warm paths" will be interested in knowing that they will have to choose the type of heat-insulating material, its thickness and the number of layers on their own. The industry produces many types of thermal insulation materials for pipes. In addition to slabs, briquettes and rolls of different formats, many materials are in the form of pipes of different diameters. Usually, the panels are laid out at the bottom of the trench as a base that reliably shields heat, and pipes are already laid on top of them. The indisputable advantage of such a system is the absence of operating costs, since both technical and sewage waters can act as a heat source. The disadvantages traditionally include the high cost of the system and the complexity of the gasket - thermal insulation materials should be installed overlapping to avoid the appearance of cold bridges.

The service life of the road, as already mentioned, is decades. In order for the track to be heated with high quality during this entire period without unnecessary consumption of heat and energy resources, it is necessary to use a heat insulator with the same service life. Unfortunately, dealers of large companies producing thermal insulation materials (TIM) sometimes do not have all the information about the product and mislead buyers.

The fact is that not all TIMs are designed for long-term service, they are suitable for outdoor use and burying in the ground, because, when wet, they lose their insulating properties, and under the influence of frost they are destroyed. This is the behavior of materials based on mineral wool and expanded polystyrene, not sealed in special waterproofing shells, or expanded polystyrene with a loose outer layer. Large firms, as a rule, produce a wide range of products for different purposes, and it can be very difficult for a non-professional to determine what is needed by eye. Manufacturers do not hide the purpose of their products, the buyer should only carefully read the recommendations in the product annotation or in the advertising brochure. The complexity is the amount of texts that will have to be studied before it is possible to get to the truth. Thermal insulation is also welcomed in the case of laying a heating cable, but it is not necessary to build a ditch. For targeted anti-icing, it is enough to lay one layer of heat-insulating material under the cement mortar.