Our melt-capability verdict for the Ohio Valley is keeps up, and readers here should treat it with more suspicion than the number deserves elsewhere. The verdict is computed entirely from snowfall day-counts — how many days a year the reference station records an inch, three inches, five. This zone’s characteristic winter hazard is freezing rain and ice, and no part of that computation can see it. That is a limitation of our instrument, not a subtlety about the weather, and it belongs at the top of the page rather than in a footnote.

What the verdict actually says

Columbus averages 26.7 in of snow a year (NOAA 1991–2020 normal, station USW00014821, elevation 247 m) across 8.2 days at or above an inch. The design day — the deepest daily threshold it crosses at least once a year — is 3 in, recorded on 2.1 days. Against the 2 in/hr melt rate every portable mat on the market claims for itself, that clears in 1.5 hours. Annual snowfall at the same claimed rate gives 13.35 hours of running a year.

Both sit inside our keeps-up limits of 2 hours and 25 hours respectively. So: for the snow that falls here, a mat’s own marketing claim is adequate. That is the entire content of the verdict.

Why an ice storm is outside it

A melt rate is published in inches of snow per hour. Freezing rain is not measured in inches per hour of snow, does not accumulate as snow depth, and is not counted by any threshold in the record above — the NOAA snowfall normals we use have no freezing-rain equivalent. So there is no honest way to run our computation against an ice event, and we have not tried.

What we can say is what is missing and what would fix it. data/snow-zones.json carries no ice-storm frequency for any zone, because we found no source publishing one on a normals-equivalent basis — a 30-year climatological average, per station, comparable across the country. A published freezing-rain-hours normal, per station, from NOAA or a state climatologist would close it. Until then this page reports a snowfall verdict and says plainly that the zone’s reputation rests on something the verdict does not measure.

A related honesty point about the product claim itself. Manufacturers market these mats against snow, and the 2 in/hr figure is a snow figure. A surface held above freezing plainly behaves differently in freezing rain than an unheated one, but no manufacturer in our records publishes a specification for that behaviour, and we are not going to convert a snow figure into an ice claim on their behalf.

One station, five states

This zone and the Appalachian Highlands are the only two US zones on the site backed by a single reference station. Everything above comes from Columbus, standing in for southern Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, Kentucky and the West Virginia lowlands.

Columbus sits at 247 m in flat terrain, so it is a less distorting stand-in than a mountain station would be — but it is still one point. Kentucky’s winters are not Columbus’s, and a reader near the Ohio River should treat the snowfall figures here as indicative rather than local.

Running costs, which are low and not the deciding factor

Embedded electric products in our records publish 41–50.09 W/sq ft — ThermoSoft NeverFreeze at the bottom of that range, WarmlyYours at the top. On the 400 sq ft two-car driveway WarmlyYours uses as its own worked example, that is a connected load of 16.4–20.04 kW, derived by multiplying published density by published area rather than quoted from a spec sheet.

Across this zone’s 13.35-hour burden that is 219–267 kWh a season:

A single design-day storm runs $3.90–$4.76. These are small numbers, and the reason to publish them is to make clear that operating cost is not what decides anything in this zone. WarmlyYours’ own general-market runtime cross-check of 50–120 hours a season would instead give $130–$381 here — roughly four to nine times our figure, because their range was built for snowier markets than Columbus. We show both and reconcile neither.

The capital question, which does decide it

Embedded cable is published at $8–$25 per square foot installed including materials and labour (WarmlyYours, page dated 2026-07-02), so $3,200–$10,000 for a 400 sq ft driveway. At 8.2 snow days a year — about 82 across a decade — that is $39 to $122 per snow day of capital cost alone, our division of the published range by the published event count over a stated horizon.

That figure is doing something specific: it is deliberately counting only snow days, because snow days are all our data counts. If your winter includes several ice events a year that never register as an inch of snow, the real use rate is higher than 82 a decade and the per-event cost is lower than $39–$122 — and we cannot tell you by how much, for the reasons above. This is the one zone on the site where our own numbers are likely to understate the case for heating.

The small answer, and who should not buy

A HeatTrak HR20-60 covers 8.33 sq ft at $229.99, which is $27.61 per square foot heated; five plus the required HR-P power unit ($39.99) reach 41.65 sq ft for $1,189.94 at 12.5 A of a 13 A ceiling. Our layout planner assembles those from published dimensions and amp figures. For a walk, a landing or a set of steps in a zone with 29.8 days a year of measurable snow, that is proportionate.

We cannot cost one per hour. HeatTrak publishes 2.5 A at 120 V for that mat and states no tolerance on its residential pages — its PRO sheets carry ±10%, the residential ones nothing, and an absent tolerance is not a tolerance of zero. The product is 300 VA of apparent power, which is not a wattage. Our storm cost tool will show that band against your own rate and will not collapse it into a dollar figure.

Nor do we carry a seasonal plow price — the only publishers are lead-generation marketplaces quoting their own unaudited job data, unreadable at source on 2026-07-25 — so our break-even calculator asks for your own quote.

Who should not buy on this page: anyone reading the keeps-up verdict as covering ice, which it does not. Anyone in Kentucky or along the river treating a Columbus normal as a local one. And anyone expecting a heated surface to make a slope walkable in freezing rain — reducing accumulation is what these products are specified to do, and none of them publishes anything about traction.