Landmark Landscapes in Sheboygan Falls, WI, has spent the last several years expanding snow services built on equipment and operational efficiency. A comprehensive ice management program, including expanding the company’s use of liquids, has been a key focus. Operations Manager Joe Sell, CSP, ASM, says he’s building on his predecessor’s foray into liquids. The company started small by experimenting with anti-icing, using a converted 200-gallon bed sprayer hooked to a small hitch-mounted boom. That was enough to yield promising results, which have since spurred the dramatic expansion of liquids use. "The first year we really got into liquids we added two VSI 750 sprayers, our own brine maker and freshwater tanks. I’m a pretty hands-on-type person, so it has been exciting for me to learn the science behind it," Sell says.

Today, the company mixes custom blends and has a 15,000-gallon storage capacity at its facility, along with two 3,000-gallon tanks that can be brought online when needed. "We sort of decided that if we’re doing this, we’re going to be all in," he says. "I think we just saw the need, and the company was growing and making the money that really supported the capital purchase."

Mix it up

Even with solid vendor support, Sell says mastering liquids requires "playing around a little bit." A big part of the learning curve, he says, is figuring out the right amount of water to put in the mix, and making little tweaks so the product isn’t "too hot, too light, too salty, not salty enough, and that it stays in suspension."

Quality control

One important lesson Sell learned was the importance of salt quality when making liquids. "We thought we could just do it with our normal rock salt, but we were getting very poor quality initially," he says, citing dirt and gravel in the salt mix that didn’t break down well. Shopping around yielded a different source with cleaner, whiter salt that performed much better.

Client education is key

Another part of adopting a liquids program is customer education, Sell stresses. "In the first year we got one phone call asking: ‘Why are you spraying water on my parking lot?’" he recounts. That was a clear sign that more information needed to be provided. The decision was made to sell liquids as a premium product— one that’s better for the environment and for the clients’ surfaces and infrastructure.

"By year two we were able sell a little more of it just by educating people, and by then I had gone through the SIMA liquids certificate course, which also helped me to educate our sales team, because you’ve got to know what you’re selling. And by the third year of our liquids program, we changed all of our contracts to ‘ice management’ and put in verbiage to state basically that ‘we will use the best techniques and the most modern advanced technologies to provide you the safest environment.’ That really frees us up to say, ‘Is this a salt event or is this a brine event?’ "

Still learning

Despite the company’s progress, Sell says the liquids program still has room to grow. "We haven’t really been as confident with how to use liquids in wet conditions; and the last two winters here, and in a lot of places, have been really wet. For that reason, we haven’t gone fully 100% brine usage. If there’s a rain event or freezing rain, we go back to our salt spreaders."

After several years of experience, Sell is becoming more confident in when and how to use liquids and continues to experiment, especially in tricky conditions. He says that closed commercial sites on weekends provide a good venue for this type of experimentation, because if the results aren’t there, there’s still time to retreat before the work week starts.

Capturing and analyzing data is essential to improving the program. The sprayers log application information, and Landmark keeps an infrared temperature gun in all of its brine trucks to record surface and air temperatures at the time of application.

Sell says that it’s important to keep learning and pushing forward because he’s convinced that liquids are a key part of any successful ice management program, especially as winter weather seems to be trending warmer and wetter. "And I do believe that eventually environmental restrictions [will push things in that direction]. It’s important for me that we’re ahead of that curve."

Liquids setup video

Joe Sell shares a look at Landmark Landscapes' liquids setup. View the video here.

Patrick White has covered the landscape and snow and ice management industries for a variety of magazines for over 25 years. He is based in Vermont. Contact him at pwhite@meadowridgemedia.com.