I have no experience with heated drives, but I assume the snow above the heated surface may become ice above the adjacent unheated surface. I could be wrong.

Snowblowing is an olympic sport where I practice architecture.

Crowning your heated drive to move any water towards the edges would be a good idea.

If you get a lot of snow, I'd love to see a tidy clear driveway without the icky piles of packed / chunky snow all along the sides.

What is the path of the melted water to the street? Will it puddle right in front of the driveway and refreeze? Or refreeze at the curb leading away from the drive.

Do the numbers, please. Calculate the time value of money and how long 30K would last paying the neighbor kid to snowblow the driveway.

Are there residential plowing services in your area (not county)? Have you compared the cost of contracting for someone to plow your driveway every winter to the cost of putting in a heated driveway? For C$30K, that would cover many many many years.

I don’t have a heated driveway but I wish we had put one in when we built our house 9 years ago. Shoveling and plowing are a pain and rough on the driveway and landscaping.

Thanks for sharing pictures of that white stuff, Mark. We don't often see that here in coastal Virginia. When we do, it typically melts in a day. It looks beautiful--and even more so knowing that it's someone else's problem to shovel, plow, blow, salt, melt, sand, etc. The downside to living here is that ice fishing season is really, really short.

Here is another showing the snow that slid off the metal roof the day after the other picture was taken. The front entry is behind the bird feeder. I do not think a heated walkway would have helped us any.

This location is at a latitude north of Toronto, about 3 miles east of Lake Michigan.

A house in our neighborhood had a heated driveway put in several years ago. I kept meaning to drive by after a snow but, well, our driveway wasn’t clear yet, or the roads weren’t cleared…but as they were installing, I wondered about the front walk.

Driveways usually have a slope to the street, but front walks don’t. When you melt on a front walk, where does the melt go?

We had heated sidewalks and entry at my last place of employment. We're in lake effect snow country. It worked well for light snows, but could not keep up with severe cold (below 10F) or rapid snowfall. Then put came the snowblower and rock salt, which defeated the whole purpose of the system.

Heated driveway n walkways is nice. And safer for folks concerned about slipping n falling down. We installed a heat line for our entry walk way. It's on its own zone so we can control it. If you already have in floor hydronic heating, 30 grand for adding on the driveway sounds expensive

I think the idea behind heated driveways is not to remove snow or eliminate the need for plowing or blowing. They are to keep it from icing afterwards. When snow is blowing around, the driveway can be dry. In the ski resorts (CO, UT) they are fairly common on the $10M homes. As you drive around you can tell who has them (most of them do).

Where most people live in Canada, it would seem like a waste. Are you near Toronto? It is also something that can be legislated away and then it really is a waste. I live in a wet area but we have rules about irrigation and hotlines for neighbors to report violations - no rewards yet but I could see it - and your driveway is at least partially in public view.. The whole concept is a waste anyway but if you have 500 inches of snow a year with steep drives, it makes a whole lot more sense.

I was a bit surprised you are still allowed to use fuel for heat on new construction - I guess Ontario is trying to buck the trend here (assuming that is still where you are).

Not offering an opinion here, but passing along a related tale. A friend and her husband raise cattle in Wyoming. Their bulls broke out of their pasture one day and discovered that a nearby (and very fancy) property had a heated driveway. Breaking out became a regular pastime so that the bulls could go lie down on a nice warm bed whenever the weather got particularly cold. They did considerable damage to their own fence line and the neighbors’s landscaping each time they broke out until a stronger fence was established.

Obviously you'll need a strong fence if you're next to cattle. Or llamas, etc.

If you've the 30k extra and don't need the 5% interest it earns, install it. Don't give up snow blowing for fun. Turn the heat on after you use the snowblower. You get to have fun and save money.

Sometimes signage can be an effective deterrent. Why not post a sign that says "Heated driveway. No bull."?

Heated driveways (and elevators) are common on new higher end homes hereabouts, including two other new builds on our five house court. So it's tempting for re-sale, if for no other reason. And we see it as essential on the 11 step basement walkout if we rent out the basement unit.

Should we have as many vehicles as usual, snow plowing or blowing around may be impractical.

We intentionally left our driveway in Connecticut unpaved and instead used assorted size gravel. This has the advantage having some traction when there is a low to medium amount of snow and ice. No plowing necessary. When there is more snow and ice, we would have the driveway plowed (with a raised plow). This put us back to the high traction surface. Also, the sun would heat the rocks and provide a "heated driveway" because then the ice would melt.

We had to add some gravel about every 2-3 years. I lived there for forty years and never regretted our original decision.

I may be wrong about this, but i somehow doubt that most people will pay 30k more for a house with a heated driveway? or not buy a house because it doesn't have one? mostly it just seems incredibly wasteful to me so i probably wouldn’t use it anyway…

I've seen a few driveways done that used electric cables, one homeowner said he paid 12k for his... Maybe that be a better option for you, get a few prices.

A heated drive won't keep the snow off car/truck parked outside. You need a larger 60k garage for that. Vehicles do give you a clean space underneath when you move them. Snowblowing can still work.

I would guess that most houses that have heated driveways have plenty of garage space to park all their vehicles. I know someone that added a heated driveway because their driveway was relatively Steep and long, and it would get icy in the winter and be almost impossible to drive up unless you had a four wheel drive truck. In that case, they would use it to prevent ice formation, and sometimes it would still require snow removal, but not always. It really depends on how much it snows in your area. In canada, I imagine that you'll still need to have separate snow removal and a heated driveway would just be a nice perk to ensure that once the snow is removed, there's no remaining ice.

Canada (where people live) does not really have exceptional snowfall. Toronto is 47 inches. Buffalo NY is 94 inches. Chicago 37 inches.

Vail, CO is 231 inches. Now that is snow.

Just because Canada is north of the US doesn't mean it has a lot of snowfall or exceptionally cold weather.

Our average snowfall is 262”. Last year was 400+. Ws didn’t do a heated drive, BUT it wasn’t the construction cost but rather the utility cost and environmental factors that drove our decicion and the fact that our drive is relatively short (as are most in town and close to the ski area) and faces south (which is really a huge pro as far as snowmelt is concerned). Sure there are some days when snow blowing is nice but really not as often as you might think and I’ve never been able to get out of the drive after a big snow even without it. In our higher end neighborhood inly a handfull of houses have heated drives. But as David said in the Uber high end upward of 10m, heated drives are much more common, but those homes usually have more land and longer drives (also farther out from town, so while their driveways may be fine their roads must still wait for the plows.) In our small neighborhood in the recent 3.5 to 6.3 m range, I don’t see any difference in sales price in heated vs. not.

However, in Worthy’s situation, that might be different. Certainly he needs heated steps to the rental and if all the houses in the neighborhood have heated drives, it might be expectec by buyers.

Most homes I encountered with heated driveways had steeply sloped driveways and the houses were in $$$ neighborhoods.

Just because Canada is north of the US doesn't mean it has a lot of snowfall or exceptionally cold weather.

Broadly speaking, the climate similarities cease just north of the international border.

Map: Green Building Advisor

mojomom

Yikes!

Yes we are pikers here, something like 45" a year average, and only a few weeks at most of sub-zero F. temps.

Over the 4.5 years it took to get a permit, our build has morphed from a "forever" home to a resale. So the competitive market is what counts most. In this area, the new larger builds have heated driveways, the older ones don't. Still, I'd rather put funds working at what is visible. The depths of winter, which would show off a heating system, is not the liveliest homebuying market.

Of course, where people live in Canada is not exceptionally cold or have a lot of snow. Most of Canada is exceptionally cold. That was the qualifier.

Last I checked 50% of Canadians where within 100 miles of Toronto.

I just checked and 60% of Canadians are south of Seattle. 90% are within 100 miles of the US border. 100 miles from a climate standpoint is absolutely nothing.

What is a piker?

"60% of Canadians are south of Seattle."

What? Where I live we go south to Canada over the Ambassador Bridge or through the Detroit- Windsor tunnel. Tacoma and Olympia are south of Seattle, Washington.

Not to quibble, but 30% of the Canadian population lives in southern Ontario.

Latitude is not a determinant of temperature. London, England, for instance is at latitude 56.5 vs. Chicago at 41.87.

100 miles from a climate standpoint is absolutely nothing.

Perhaps you haven't been in Buffalo, at the western end of Lake Erie. Way back in2022, it experienced 51.5" in a couple of days. The ski resort town of Collingwood on Georgian Bay, a quick 90 minute drive north of TO, had 150+ inches of snow last year vs. TO's average 45".

True that - if there is no big body of water or change in elevation, 100 miles is relatively small. But absolutely, you are right. I spent 4 years in Buffalo but not during the recent dumping. We did get 30 inches at a time a couple of times when I was there.

Sometimes I feel that the average American thinks Canada is a frozen tundra which makes the advice a little skewed.