Agricultural Ice Solution
Cheap way to continuously keep snow off a 20,000+ sq ft metal poultry-house roof?
I’m trying to come up with a cheap, simple system to prevent snow from accumulating on very large poultry-house roofs.
Each house is roughly 500 ft long × 40 ft wide, with a pitched metal/tin roof, so we’re talking about 20,000+ sq ft per building. Because of the size, normal solutions like heat cable everywhere or manually raking the roof aren’t really practical.
The goal isn’t necessarily to remove 8 inches of snow after it accumulates. The system could run continuously while it’s snowing, so it only has to deal with fresh accumulation.
Some ideas I’ve considered:
Heating the attic enough to keep the tin slightly above freezing. The houses already have large gas heating systems, and potentially a couple additional gas heaters could be installed in the attic.
A blower/air knife that mechanically travels up and down the roof continuously and blows fresh snow toward the eave.
A cable, pipe, brush, or lightweight bar that travels up and down the roof and continuously pushes/disturbs the snow so it slides off.
Warm water along the ridge, although freezing/refreezing and water consumption are obvious problems.
Some kind of vibration system that prevents snow from sticking to the metal.
The biggest requirements are cheap, reliable, simple to install, and scalable to an enormous roof area. It doesn’t have to leave the roof perfectly dry—it just needs to prevent enough accumulation that snow load doesn’t become dangerous.
If you had to design something like this as cheaply as possible, what approach would you try? I’m especially interested in mechanical or agricultural solutions that could be built rather than expensive commercial snow-melting systems.