Stormseal’s Toughest Test: Surviving a Swiss Alpine Winter

Stormseal’s latest safety test owes a lot to the #MythBusters. We love how the MythBusters are unafraid to scale up their experiments.

Like: if we can’t blow it up with baking soda and vinegar, let’s try C-4! They do it partly to make good television, but also to push the limits of their understanding. As MythBusters host Adam Savage put it, ‘bigger is always better.’

Stormseal’s resistance to severe weather has been proven under controlled conditions: 150mph/240kph wind tunnel tests and hail impact tests, for example. When installed on damaged Australian roofs, we’ve seen Stormseal resist all weather for up to a year. Sadly, sometimes that’s how long storm victims have to wait before permanent repairs can be made. We feel really sorry for them if they’re living under flapping, leaking tarpaulins for that long.

But what if we installed Stormseal on a roof of a hut in the Swiss Alps – at 3,900 metres altitude (12,700 ft), where winter brings 155mph/250kph winds and temperatures of -40 degrees – and left it there for a year?

Adam Savage also said ‘failure is always an option’. If we put a tarpaulin through the same test, failure would be guaranteed. We can’t wait to see how well Stormseal survives the Swiss winter.

The hut is in Zermatt, close to the Swiss-Italian border and the Matterhorn. We want to express our gratitude to our intrepid installation crew: thank you Florian Perren, Reinhard Lauber, Tom from #topropeaccess and Marco (the snowcat driver). Check out the stunning scenery in their ‘Before’ photos.

We’ll post the results of this experiment with ‘After’ photos around this time next year, because we learned from Adam Savage that ‘the difference between screwing around and science is writing it down’!

Learn more about Stormseal at www.stormseal.com.

Editor’s note: This article first published on Stormseal’s website and can be viewed here.