Jan 31-Feb 3, 2020 Snowstorm
I draped 3 x 100' lengths of Roof Heater wire all over the Annex roof. Each 100' is rated at 500W. With all 3 on, it consumes about 1400W. They were on for 78 hours through the storm and the following day. The storm dropped close to 22" of snow. At $3.60/day, it cost me $11.70 to basically have that roof clear within 1 day of the storm ending. This really worked out as good as I could have hoped. At one point, I had some killer icicles that were at least 5' long! The roof is too flat and quickly gets in the way of the observatory roof. This made it so that I could image the day after a blizzard! I also created a shell widget that pops up if i apply power to any or all of the 3 heaters so that I am constantly reminded that these heaters are on and it also shows me the total power they are consuming. I did try and open the roof today, but it has about 12" of heavy wet snow all over both sides which make the already heavy roof too much to move for the garage door opener that propels it. I can rake the front but not the back. If the roof heaters continue to work as they did in this storm, I will likely put the same on the observatory roof. This will be more expensive to run but will likely not need to run for as long as the roof pitch will help unlike the annex which is almost a flat roof. I don't have 110v in the rolling roof, only 12V, so that needs to be delt with factoring in that I will be running over 3000W in heater wire.
The pics below are oldest to newest. The second set after that are pics from the South gable cam on the observatory which faces the annex roof. The set also includes some pics from around the yard taken with my pole cam.
November 2021 Update:
I had 2 friends help me drape 500' of heater wire in each channel of the roof on JRO. Now it won't snow this winter, and I am ok with that!
Set 2