Welcome to brain Stuff from house stuff Works dot com where smart happens. I am Marshall Brain with today's question. Is it possible to make snow in your backyard like a ski resort makes snow on a mountaintop. If you live in a climate that's cold enough, then the answer is yes. You need a place where it gets down to twenty degrees fahrenheit or colder at night and preferably during the daytime as well. But if you live in that kind of climate, then it's possible to make snow
in your backyard in two different ways. The first way involves compressed air. The idea is to create for yourself a nozzle that has pressurized water coming in and mixing with compressed air from a fairly large air compressor. The compressed air has the effect of blowing the water out as a fine from the end of the nozzle, but
it has another effect as well. As it expands, it releases heat, cooling the water, and then as it hits the cold air, it freezes into tiny granules or droplets of ice, which fall to the ground and look like snow. If you poke around on Google, it's fairly easy to find instructions for building these kind of nozzles. They're not complicated. They're made out of little pieces of galvanized pipe that you might buy at a place like home depot or lows.
You put them together. You have one input for the air, a t connection, and another input for the water. They mix in the pipe and then blow out an in cap in which you drill a small hole. Most people who are doing this build three or four of these nozzles and pump snow out for you know, hours or days at a time to build up a layer in their backyard. The second technique is to use a very large and powerful fan that creates a blast of air out of an air nozzle, and then to arrange misters
around that air nozzle. The air from the fan blasts the droplets from the mists upward, and those droplets freeze in mid air and fall to the ground. Usually you can create a larger volume of snow this way, but you need a lower temperature for it to work. Now, what if you live in Florida. You're not going to be making snow yourself because it doesn't get cold enough at night. But you still do have an option. There are companies that will bring huge blocks of ice to
your house in a truck with a crusher. They'll crush that ice in defined particles and then spray it over your yard. It'll last, you know, a day or two, depending on how warm it is. It is a way to create the look of snow in your yard in a warmer climate. For moral This and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our homepage. The House Stuff Works
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