How snow removal works
hour by hour
Everyone promises reliable. Almost nobody will tell you what happens at three in the morning. This is how snow removal works here, in sequence — what starts a visit, in what order, and what we do when a storm does not cooperate.
Your price
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Four steps, and none of them is a sales visit
Starting is the shortest part of how snow removal works here. Nobody stands in your driveway with a clipboard, nobody rings back three times, and you can stop at any point without having agreed to anything.
What actually to your driveway sends a machine
This is the part worth reading slowly, because it is where most contracts are vague and where the disagreements come from. Ours is a measurement rather than an opinion, and the measurement is written into the agreement.
Once 5cm has fallen the run goes out. It is a number in your agreement rather than a decision someone makes on the morning, which means there is nothing to argue about afterwards.
- Against the local forecast record
Environment Canada publishes what actually fell, station by station. That is the record the threshold is read against, which means it is a public number rather than one only we can see.
Environment Canada — Ottawa forecast - Measured where you are
Against accumulation in your area, not at the airport. Ottawa is wide enough that a band can drop ten centimetres on one side and almost nothing on the other, and the trigger has to follow the snow rather than the headline.
- A long storm gets more than one visit
If it is still snowing when the route finishes, it starts again. A storm is not one visit by definition — it is however many the accumulation calls for, which is why the pass is priced by season rather than by visit.
City of Ottawa — winter maintenance
None of that requires you to do anything. The threshold is measured, the route is dispatched, and you find out by looking at the driveway.
A storm, from the machine’s side
The timings below are how the service is designed to run. They are not a description of jobs already done, because this line is new — they are what you can hold the agreement to, which is a different and checkable kind of promise.
Almost all of the work happens while you are asleep, and that is a deliberate choice rather than a convenience. A service that starts at seven and works down a list is, by the middle of that list, arriving after its customers needed to leave. Finishing before the commute means the route has to begin during the storm rather than after it.
It also means the route order matters more than the crew size. Routes are built geographically so a machine is not crossing the city twice, and each one holds a fixed number of properties for exactly this reason: a route you keep adding to is a route that finishes later every year until the promise is no longer true.
What we will not do is tell you a precise arrival time. Anyone who gives you one for a snow night is guessing, because the storm decides. What is committed to is the window and the sequence, and both are in writing.
The four situations that actually cause problems
Every service has bad mornings. What separates them is whether the bad morning was planned for. These four are the ones that come up, and what happens in each is decided in advance rather than negotiated at the time.
Five commitments, all of them checkable
These are deliberately written so that you can tell whether they were kept. A promise you cannot check is a slogan, and a company describing how snow removal works in its first winter is in no position to ask anyone to take slogans on faith.
- 01The price does not move
What is written before you sign is what you pay for the season. Not a starting price, not subject to conditions discovered in February.
- 02The trigger is a number
5cm, measured in your area, written into the agreement. Not "when it is bad enough", which is a phrase that means whatever the contractor needs it to mean.
- 03The ridge is included
Clearing what the municipal plow leaves across your entrance is in the base price on every plan, including the return trip. It is the most common hidden line item in this trade.
- 04The operators are insured
Every crew and every machine, on every visit. Ask any contractor for proof of this before you sign with them, including us.
- 05A bad clear is redone free
You call, we come back, nothing is charged. No threshold to meet and no argument about whether it was bad enough to count.
Not all snow removal services are the same
— here's the difference
The difference between contractors is almost never the machine. It is whether how snow removal works was written down before the winter started, or decided each morning after it.
How snow removal works — common questions
Where to go next
The three pages people usually read after this one, depending on what they are still deciding.
- What it costsEvery plan and every driveway size, with the assumptions written out rather than hidden in a footnote.
- What is includedThe four surfaces cleared on every visit, and the two things charged separately.
- Whether we reach youTwelve towns on the routes, each with its own page and its own winter problem.
See your price
then decide
See your price, then decide You have read how snow removal works here. Driveway size and postal code is all the calculator needs for the price — a real range in about twenty seconds, with nothing committed until a written figure has been confirmed against your property.