WINTER MAINTENANCE KEEP YOUR GRIT
The reasons to put a gritting contact in place are numerous. In commercial businesses, you safeguard productivity levels by ensuring your employees can get into work as normal. In retail environments, you don’t risk sales plummeting due to shoppers not being able to reach you. This is particularly crucial surrounding the peak Christmas season, when reduced December revenues could affect your results for the whole year.
If you don’t spread salt on your own site, you risk your business grinding to a hal DIFFERENT TYPES OF FROST
Another important reason to grit your site is that it keeps staff and visitors safe, by striving to prevent slips and trips due to icy conditions underfoot. This also helps protect you from potentially costly accident and injury claims, that could affect your bottom line and your reputation.
Gritting companies invest a lot of money into forecasting, equipment and software so that we can best prepare for all eventualities. This helps us to provide the best service possible to businesses of varying industries.
If you’re an FM in charge of sites across a large area, you don’t want to have one company gritting a small carpark at a Veterinary Practice and then a different company for a retail park. It is best to choose a winter maintenance provider that has a wide range of spreading equipment who is able to offer a comprehensive service to meet the requirements of all the sites in your portfolio. You will then ensure a consistency of service across all your locations and liaise with one main contact regarding all properties.
There is a common misconception that when a site has been gritted there will always be salt visible, but that is not the case. The purpose of gritting is to lay salt on your site’s surface to prevent ice from forming, therefore companies endeavour to service sites before the temperatures reach freezing point (0°C).
The salt that is applied will mix with air/surface moisture, break down into a saline solution (brine), and thus lower the freezing point of the grounds surface. This process prevents ice from forming on your site. So rather than seeing grains of salt and patches of ice, you would notice damp patches where the brine is sitting.
Spreading salt after ice has already formed is effective, however it takes much longer to break down ice that has already formed.
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People are sometimes shocked or confused when they see frost on the grass or have to scrape their car windscreens but didn’t see any gritters out and about overnight. This can be down to the difference in air versus ground temperature and if there was moisture on the ground. Sometimes you may have very cold temperatures but because there is no moisture present in the air then there is no risk of a frost and therefore no need to grit.
Ground frost A ground frost refers to the formation of ice on the ground, objects or trees, whose surface have a temperature below the freezing point of water. During situations when the ground cools quicker than the air, a ground frost can occur without an air frost.
A grass frost, an unofficial type of ground frost, can occur when other surfaces - such as concrete or road surfaces - don’t experience a frost, due to their better ability at holding onto any warmth. It is possible for a grass frost to occur in late spring or even early summer when the risk of more wide-spread frosts
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