How do you keep ice off stairs and walkways?

[Nathan Gesner]

Can anyone recommend a product that melts ice/snow without damaging concrete? 

Our County has been using beet juice for a couple years and it's supposed to work very well down to -30 degrees and is very environmentally friendly. I just can't find anyone that sells it even though beets are one of our primary crops in the local area.

Any other recommendations that are available on the open market?

[Nathan Gesner]

Originally posted by @Jim K.:

I think it's important to remember that @Nathan Gesner is in Wyoming. Salt as a melter only works down to zero degrees Fahrenheit, and with vastly diminishing results at 5-10 degrees. Here in Pgh, we rarely have to worry about temperatures in that range. Salt isn't the same kind of weapon against winter weather in Wyoming as it is here, and Nathan doesn't have the luxury of a prolonged growing season to repair his grass every year. It sometimes snows in June up there.

Nathan, I live here in balmy western PA now but I grew up in upstate New York and went to school in one of the blizzard capitals of America, on the shore of Lake Ontario. My wife is from Yekaterinburg, Russia, the coldest +1M population center in the world. They have these little shrines there in the Ural Mountains along level, straight highways to mark the places people's cars conked out in the middle of the night and they froze to death.

Yes, Jim, it is definitely a little cooler here. I was stationed at Ft Drum for two years where they dumped salt like it was going out of style. I had a Toyota Celica and can remember driving to work in snow so deep that it piled up on the hood of my car and I would have to brush it off about ten times just to make it two miles to work. That took about an hour. Then they would close the base and I'd spend another hour or more trying to get back home. Lake effect snow is fun!