Snow Do's & Don'ts: Deck Care & Maintenance

"Hi this is Drew Finn for expertvillage.com we are going to talk about cleaning and maintaining a deck. This video is presented by Black Dog Video and you can visit us on the web on blackdogvideo.biz. Got to remove snow from the deck so first we would do it with a shoveling. Now when I do shovel the snow I want to go on the direction of the grooves and the wood and this is what you want to do whether if you got a wood deck or one of the other types of deck covering. Go in the direction if you go perpendicular to them it is going to bump through each of them and you are going to hit the edges of the wood and do damage and take the finish off it. So we want to shove in the direction of the grooves. Now this deck we got boards going both ways so it get kind of complicated. You heard a just hit the corner that is what we don't want to do put a little ding on it. So that is how we shovel and I prefer a shovel with a plastic bottom. It is going to do a lot less damage to our decking. The other type of shovel we don't want to use is this one has a metal limp on it and it got sharp edges we can do a lot of damage to our deck surface. So we definitely don't want to use one with sharp edges. Some people file the corners off but you still have a sharp edge along the front. If you hit something you can really groove your wood so we don't want to use that. So if we have a large amount of snow, a foot or two, when we shoveling the deck we got to look at the loads on it we don't want to start from the inside and just pile it through the outside of the deck because before are finish in shoveling it off we are going to have a lot of weight on the outside of the deck. So what you want to do is work through the deck and not pile it up along the outer edge."