Tired of snow and the pain and efforts you need to endure while getting the snow of your way. Now, an Indian American home owner’s new invention can help make this process easier and smoother. Raj Parikh has invented a snowmelt system that helps melt snow an inch and half per hour, reported www.nj.com here on January 28.
Raj Parikh, who has lived in his Paramus, New Jersey, house since 1980, has radically redesigned it in accordance with nature, calling it the “Zenesis House,” and hardly had to do any shoveling in last week’s snow blizzard that hit the East Coast. The house has no furnace, no air conditioner and no hot water heater but has the ability to melt the snow right off the driveway,.
Using the powers of nature to fight the snow, the Parikh family developed a geothermal snowmelt system that warms water to about 100 degrees using solar collectors and geothermal pumps. That water is piped underneath the driveway and walkways.
The Parikhs use the sun and the ground to heat and cool the house as well. During the winter, the house intakes air warmed by the sun and carries it 12 feet underground to be heated by the ground before piping it inside. The incoming air is also heated by exhaust air coming from the kitchen and bathroom. To cool the house, the air takes the same route; only it skips the solar collectors.
Heated driveways are widely available, but they usually burn gas or oil, Raj’s son Asit was quoted as saying. “They’re burning fuel,” he said. “There’s no combustion in this system. It’s just the earth and the sun.” The house also has systems to collect rainwater and the very snow it melts during winter storms.
“By capturing the sun’s warmth during the day, and by utilizing 2 ground-source (geothermal) heat pumps and our proprietary heat exchange system, our snowmelt system keeps the driveway shoveled— even on blizzard day,” Asit wrote on Facebook, expressing his happiness over the success of the system.
