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Meltsnow.com – Your Partner in Ice Melting and Snow Melting Materials

Essentially, snow melter and ice melting products fall into one of two categories:

1. Freeze-point depression chemicals, which form solutions or brines of that chemical. These chemicals have freeze points lower than the ambient temperatures. Freeze-point depressors are all chlorides, all glycols, and many forms of salt that are not chlorides, such as Urea and sulphates.
2. Characteristic altering chemicals, which change surface tension and other properties of snow and ice to make it less prone to stick together when freezing. Characteristic altering chemicals are all acetates and most formates.

Whenever you see snow that is not melting on a surface (along with black and wet pavement in the street), it’s safe to assume that the street received a dose of a freeze-point depression chemical that formed a brine or liquid.

Watch the outside temperatures and see how various freeze-point depression chemicals stop working at given temperatures. For example, salt cannot form a brine below 4 degrees Fahrenheit — it’s chemically impossible. And for all practical purposes, salt stops working at 16 degrees Fahrenheit unless it is enhanced with another performance deicer that allows it to brine at temperatures below its bottom practical mark of 16F.

That’s where both the liquid and dry products that we sell come in: the DowFlake® can get salt working down to its eutectic temperature of 4 degrees, which is an otherwise impossible task. The DowFlake® uses a combination of exothermic heat of dilution along with good old-fashioned chemistry to “punch” the salt — much in the same way you can help a low battery with jumper cables.

Here’s a list of our products by chemical name and brand name:

So what’s the solution? Meltsnow.com’s deicers, which will keep everything open and clear. The performance additives in our products work best and can demonstrate the greatest improvement.