I once broke a shear pin after a length of old sump pump discharge hose buried under a snow pile became entangled in the auger blades. The spare shear pins were missing, so I figured I'd take a cheap steel 1/4-20 bolt and grind it down until its just about a 1/16 of an inch diameter at the point where the auger tube and drive shaft meet. It did not work as the following snow fall I hit a rock and the damn thing jumped violently and I let go of the drive clutch which prevented it from completely self destructing. The auger tube hole was gouged from the screw on both sides, the screw bent into a Z shape and the housing was slightly bent askew. After some reforming in my shop it was working fine again and still runs to this day. That Craftsman 5HP blower has taken a hell of a beating, is in rough shape but still runs. I keep wanting to up the HP a bit but its seen enough abuse.
Pro tip: always winterize the engine to keep it running for years. Drain the fuel completely, and drain the carburetor bowl. Pull the spark plug and put a cap full of motor oil in the cylinder and gently turn the engine over by hand using the pull cord to coat the walls. Also helps to tape over the exhaust and stuff the intake port with steel wool to keep critters out of the passages. I once had a generator suddenly stop working and upon pulling the plug found a dead spider across the electrodes which shorted it.
Good tip about blocking the intake/exhaust (I'll do that this year). I normally just hand pump out the gas until there is just a little left and then start it up and let it run dry. I then do an oil change and tape a note over the oil plug that I did the oil change as otherwise I'll not remember the next Winter.
I initially didn't take the "drain the fuel" advice when I got my snowblower, because I never did it for my lawnmower and it was fine year after year.
And in its second season, it utterly failed to start. My friend gave me a tip to drain the fuel and put some fresh gas with a little jet fuel in it, and it started immediately.
You can always stabilize your fuel too and it will last into the next season. However, depending on your climate it may be worth it to just buy cans of fuel at the hardware store. It's much higher quality than what you'll get at a gas station and doesn't contain additives, which are very problematic for carburetors when left in the tank until the next season. It cost more but if you're not blowing snow too often you probably won't even notice the cost. They also come in smaller cans so you can store nicely if needed.
One problematic additive is ethanol, often found as 10% of gas pump fuel volume. Ethanol absorbs water vapor from the air, then settles to the bottom of the gas tank or carb bowl, and corrosion or deposits may ensue. Drain tank & run engine until carb is dry, or use canned fuel, or add stabilizer like SeaFoam and fill tank to the very top. Ethanol-free fuel is available, but may be hard to find, see: https://www.pure-gas.org/
some states sell ethanol-free gas (ours in LA are blue pump heads, diesel green, e85 is yellow, and regular gas is either red or black depending on the service station.
One of my neighbors has a shadetree business repairing small motors and he taught me to always use ethanol free, and instead of draining it (since it's got ethanol in it) to use the fuel shutoff valve and let it run the bowl dry itself.
I don't have too much small gasoline stuff left that i care about (a weedeater and a couple of honda generators i never use), my tractor is diesel, and my whole-house generator is propane (from a small tank, haven't needed to upgrade since i got the generator shortly after Hurricane Laura.)
It's noticeably better. The engine timing is so good with it compared to the gas station stuff meant for fuel injected automobile engines. Higher octane and compression I believe and the snowblower engine just hums and burns clean.
Huh. I had the opposite experience, bought some canned hardware store fuel for my snowblower out of laziness, and it wouldn’t even run. Seemed to be too high octane or something, kept stalling out. Had to drain it completely, put regular gas in and it’s fine.
The octane shouldn’t matter. It was probably really old and broke down. The main advantage of the canned gasoline is that there’s no ethanol which is really bad for small engines. It attracts moisture and doesn’t burn evenly which is why canned fuel (or any non-ethanol fuel) is so much better.
Maybe? It was from Home Depot, given their turnover i assume it was pretty new. I’m just guessing at the octane, because it sounded like the engine was running too fast, if that makes sense.
Small engines are built for e90 now, so it’s not a problem. Apart from storage.
Yeah, back when I lived in Wisconsin I would put fuel stabilizer in and I didn't have issues. I would highly recommend that over draining the fuel, which just sounds like a pain in the ass.
Most snow blower carb bowls have a drain screw so it's trivial to drain it. Cleaning the carb if gunk is in there is pretty straightforward. Generally if it fails to start then it's gunk in the carb.
I'm torn. I bought a used pressure washer that had been drained before storage. The carb bowl gasket and foot valve packing were all dried up and the carb was full of schmutz from the remaining gas and corrosion from water that had made its way in.
I'm recently leaning towards fuel stabilizer and leaving the tank full to ensure as little air space as possible for water to get in. At least for seasonal storage. Not sure about long-term storage since even stabilized fuel is supposedly only good for two years.
Reminds me of the furnace that kept throwing a low combustion air pressure code (by blinking an LED). Turned out to be a now-dead bird that got sucked into the cold air intake.
The thing I have had to do every winter is drop the carburetor bowl and spray carb cleaner up through the Jets. This means draining the gas into something, which I pre empt by draining it in the spring. Also this year I left the carb bowl off of it. And use the gas in the mower so you can start with fresh gas come winter.
The entire array of two stroke lawn tools are obsolete with electric batteries and electric motors that are more compact, higher torque, quiter, and far less polluting.
Soon, they will be cheaper. Unfortunately EV based tools slotted in the luxury upscale segment, abut vastly declining battery costs still haven't trickled down to the consumer.
High density lfp and sodium ion and solid state should change this.
The other crappy thing is that the tools use their differing shapes and molds to lock in you to a single line of tools., so you can reuse batteries across tools only of the same maker (which enables you to have a second set of freshly charged batteries when the primary drains, and you can charge the battery will hold you use the second set)
Emer really need formalized standards to force battery companies to use an interchangeable standard like disposable batteries, electric plugs, railroad rails, etc
...and while they're at it, please force the plastic tote business to use a standard lid
Electric lawnmowers and leafblowers are great, but everyone I know who's tried a (battery) electric snowblower complains it's either underpowered for anything more than a dusting or it burns out after a season.
All for electrifying all the things and getting rid of as many polluting two-stroke engines as possible, but heavy wet snow seems to be one place where the energy density of gasoline is the right tool for the job.
I don't know... I watched my grandpa hand shovel heavy wet snow until the year he died. If we really care about polution, we'd just buck up and use a hand shovel.
I have a diesel tractor and a 4WD vehicle. But I'd argue my carbon footprint is a hell of a lot smaller than most Americans (unless they live in a city, take public transport, don't own a car and don't travel by air often).
I don't leave the house much, haven't driven to work for over 10 years, have planted thousands of native perennials and trees over the years, and seeded acres of native prairie.....
Life is nuanced. I also own a 4WD truck that I spin up on the weekend to haul stuff (small farm truck). I get the impression though that everyone thinks the electrification of mechanical equipment will stop climate change and they give no thought to where and how this stuff is produced. Perhaps it is because I grew up in Utah and have watched entire mountains disappear for things like copper and gravel. I live in a pretty liberal part of town and I find it ironically distateful that my neighbors all claim to be environmentalists yet they each own and operate a snowblower to clear the 50-100 feet of sidewalk they have, purchase new cars every 3-5 years so they can commute 10 minutes to the University, and travel internationally for recreational reasons more often than most. Sorry for the rant, but something about snowblowers just sets me off for some reason.
Good on you for trying to seed native perennials. I've also embarked on a similar quest and have found it more difficult than I thought do to a few invasive plant species in my area, but am making some steady progress.
Around here the worst "aggressives" seem to be the Teasel/Dipsacus (brought over from Europe because they were used in wool production or something?), Creeping Charlie (also Europeans), and Sumac. There are some native sumacs here but the fact that there are large chunks of sumac monoculture I think that some of the sumac in my area was introduced.
Even electric lawnmowers can be a bit underwhelming power-wise. I share one with a few neighbours and it works well enough for our small downtown yards, but I would be pretty annoyed with it if I was trying to do a job any longer than about 30 minutes.
My snowblower is 283lbs with a 10hp engine. It takes about 30-45 minutes to do my 3000sf driveway for a normal snow. Adding the weight and expense of batteries is something I'm not at all interested in.
Not all manufacturers have big batteries for power tools, but the ones that do like the MX fuel that is used to run concrete tools have prices that are >$500.
You can't just recharge the battery overnight like you can in your car if it run out; you need to have the machine running to get out of the house - and filling it up with gas is just a couple minutes charging is going to take much longer.
Even the smaller machine that I had before was 8hp (but had wheels instead of tracks) and weighed 150lbs.
Snowblowers are 4 stroke engines today, I'm not even sure anyone makes a 2-stroke machine. And they certainly aren't obsolete. An electric one is fine if you have a bit of light powder but no good if you're moving a lot of deep, heavy snow off a decent amount of square footage. And don't buy a gas blower than isn't at least 2 stages.
I don't doubt the future will make them comparable and lower in cost but I wouldn't buy one today.
Other than very small engines most snowblowers and mowers are 4 stroke engines.
My last snowblower was 11.5HP, and it could take 90 minutes to clear everything after a decent snow. A battery approach wouldn’t be feasible at this point.
When one considers the difference in human effort between mowing a lawn with an old-school cylinder-of-blades push mower with no power at all, and of shoveling a driveway of snow as far as a snowblower throws it… it becomes obvious one task requires way, way more energy than the other.
I have a pretty robust electric chainsaw, but it's not great for hardwoods at all. Of course, I have 5 chainsaws so maybe I'm not the one to take advice from, I might have a problem ;)
Same for leaf blowers. I worked on a farm in the Swiss mountains where we used large Stihl leaf blowers to get the hay down the mountain [1] so we could pick it up by machine and electric leaf blowers were only used for cleanup jobs in the barn.
Nowadays I live in the city but I still get sweaty flashbacks whenever I hear a gas leaf blower during the summer months.
Oh, I hear you, every fall in Ontario (and now Wisconsin) the sound of gas leaf blowers and that high-pitch whine drives me crazy. I have an electric one to basically clear off the front porch but I feel like even that is noise pollution (much worse than a riding mower to my ears) and so I rake an acre of mixed hardwood next to the house by hand spring and fall and trailer the leaves a half mile up the road to compost.
I'm sure it was hard work, but a farm in the Swiss mountains for a period of time sounds like a life experience!
Sorry, I should clear that up. I mulch (mower) as much of the leaves as I can and leave it on the ground, I only rake up what I can't mulch. And that's to protect the ground cover under the oak trees from dying under the leaves and turning everything in to mud/eroding.
In the winter I have a driveway and 300 feet of sidewalk I have to clear, sometimes twice a day. Assuming any products on the market can even handle the job, I wouldn't want to have to manage the charging situation for my use case. Pouring in more gas is so much easier than realizing you forgot to charge the backup battery. And I don't even want to know what that would cost.
I sit here with a variety of gas-powered vehicles and tools and I agree 100% with you. I was actually seriously thinking of buying a battery powered snowblower last winter, even though I have an ATV with a snow blade and a garden tractor with a snowblower. And I can easily buy ethanol-free gas at the nearest gas station.
I'm just sick of the periodic maintenance needed with small, carbureted engines. I rarely even use my chainsaw anymore; I'd rather use the battery powered reciprocating saw with a tree blade, even though it takes longer. It's quieter and I don't to worry about how old the gas is.
Hmm. I have three snowblowers. The smallest is electric, and it's the largest electric snowblower I could find. I use it to move snow off our wooden decks and to be honest it works extremely well for that purpose. It's light (when batteries removed) so can be lifted easily between deck sections, and it's sufficiently powerful to throw snow 10ft or so off the deck.
The larger ones don't yet have an electric option available.
I bought the Ego 2 stage one 2 years ago and it has really surpassed my expectations. I get about an hour of run time with 2 7.5Ah batteries with 6" of wet snow if I'm not going full ham with the chute speed(who really needs to throw the snow 50ft anyway.)
The battery situation isn't as odious when you realize you can get third-party batteries compatible with ryobi, milwaukee, etc on Amazon for about 25% of the list price of the first party brand battery.
Moved to Western Michigan a few years back. I got the tractor for the quarter mile drive in case things get real bad but I'll tell you my strategy of "don't buy a complicated snow blower, wait for it to melt" has so far worked out well.
If you're close to any body that averages out temperatures (Lake Michigan, swamps), it melts. People have no idea how fast global warming is happening.
In the 70s, we had about 75 days each winter with more than an inch of snow left on the ground. Last winter, we had barely 20 (El Nino made it extremely warm) but the average over the past decade is currently about 45. It snowed a few times, but always melted shortly thereafter. That's a new trend.
I recently got a 36" HDPE blade shovel and will just walk my 400ft driveway for 4 or 5 passes in each direction, holding the shovel at an angle so the snow rolls off to the right like a snowplow - it's really slick (pun intended) and way easier than the old scoop-and-throw technique when there's less than an inch on the ground. Once a month, I have to start up the snowblower and clear a heavy storm and cut back the banks left by the shovel, but those are rare. If you just expose a bit of pavement, the whole thing is likely to melt in a couple days.
I don't have pavement. These edge tamers on teh bucket have been doing good for me on gravel. Lets me keep the crown on the drive. I'd love to have an actual blade but I haven't found anything cheap enough with runners.
https://r2manufacturing.com/products/edge-tamer
The heat effect you mention is there though. The drive is 4 feet up out of the swamp. I'm pretty sure its why the deer bed up against the southern side. They're using the mass of stone to stay warm.
SW Wisconsin. 7% grade, 300 foot driveway that is exposed to North winds. We had a (walking) snowblower and I used that for the first winter. It sucked.
With the hill, waiting for a melt isn't possible - there's no way to keep control of a car going down that hill, and at the base of the drive across the narrow road is a line of mature pines. We got very little snow last winter, but what snow we did mostly came in a two week window and it was multiple feet of heavy snow.
Subcompact diesel tractor with a snowpusher (not a plow). Driveway takes no time, and I use the bucket and forklift forks all the time. I have a mower deck but I use a little cub cadet instead as the tractor (especially with liquid in the back tires) is kinda heavy for a "lawn". (I have very little lawn, converted the front 3/4 acre to mostly prairie), but I still have to mow some.
It never even occurred to me that the "lake effect" would work in the opposite direction. Water's ability to retain heat is really amazing.
> People have no idea how fast global warming is happening.
For people that live near the Great Lakes, you may have stumbled onto a very compelling bit of evidence. For many, "rising ocean temperatures" is a whole world away. Whereas this kind of phenomenon is much easier to grasp.
The water table is at ground level September to April here. The ground only froze the first year we moved in, the waters keeping the heat.
I noticed that same effect with season extenders. They average out the temperatures using the raised soil as the heatsink. We harvested fresh greens from the garden on Christmas Day in Chicago, that was 5 years ago.
I just talked to a guy at a bar who's been here since the 70s, he's harvesting grapes a month early.
People who grow things know. Its everyone else I think we have to convince.
Lake Michigan is famously terribly cold to swim in. However this year I’ve found it mostly comfortable, almost as comfortable as a swimming pool. Looking online, it’s above 70 degrees! https://apps.glerl.noaa.gov/marobs/php/data.php?sta=0
Up in Door County the lake would freeze enough to ski on, but nowadays, well good luck with that.
> People have no idea how fast global warming is happening.
You're not wrong. The transition in New England in recent years has been unbelievable. I only used the snow blower twice per winter for the past few years. People who live in the southern states don't realize what's going on. The cold, snowy north is becoming a thing of the past and the best weather is moving up here.
Snowblowers usually come with a spade-like attachment clipped to the top of the auger housing for precisely this reason. Please use that instead of your hands.
I picked up a Honda snowblower for my dad's house this past winter. He shares a non-maintained road with his neighbors, and for the past few years I've helped them with shoveling. Dad always tried to do his part with clearing the snow, but wasn't able to shovel this year, so he opened his wallet.
In February I got a call from the snowblower shop that their first shipment of wheeled snowblowers had arrived. If I wanted to wait they were supposed to be getting a shipment with tracks. I measured the percent grade of our driveways and roads and decided we needed the tracked version.
Our snowblower arrived two days before a pair of back-to-back storms that dumped almost 2 feet of wet, heavy snow. It's a game changer. I asked the one neighbor, who'd said previously "the only snowblower I'd buy is a Honda" [1], what he thought as he was plodding along behind the new snowblower : "You didn't cheap out, and it's the right tool for the job."
The other neighbor was out shoveling around their car, to hopefully be able to get out for her daughter-in-law's surgery. We blasted through the steep part of her driveway. I got a text message that night: 'where did you get that thing?'
The advantage of Honda's tracked snowblower over their wheeled version is that there's a lever-operated piston that adjusts the height, while the wheeled version has no adjustment.
Over those two storms, we probably would have spent at least 12 hours shoveling (breaks included). The snowblower cleared the road in an hour.
As someone says below, it's important to drain the gasoline at the end of the winter, so it doesn't gum up over the summer. Even if there was a battery-powered two-stage snowblower, why would anyone get one? It'd be a waste of lithium.
Edit: When my mom & her husband moved to Flagstaff, their first two-stage snowblower was whatever Costco had for sale that winter. It worked for a few years, then threw a rod through the block on a particularly heavy storm. He returned the unit to Costco, read up on snowblowers, bought himself a big Ariens, and was completely happy with it.
His Ariens used a motor from Tecumseh. Tecumseh went bankrupt around 2008 and got split up [2]. Somewhere I read that Tecumseh's engine manufacturing was relocated to China, and that all the post-2009 Ariens use Chinese engines. Someone said the Chinese Tecumseh engines aren't so bad, because they got all the IP about how to make them properly. Or maybe Tecumseh's engine design was obsolete, needed to be redesigned to comply with emission regulations, and the new Chinese Tecumseh engines are better. ???
Harbor Freight sells knock-off Honda engines, as their Predator engines. There are some youtube videos that compare genuine Honda engines to the knock-offs.
Edit2: Found some forum posts that tells of how Honda's approach to manufacturing engines has changed over the years [3].
> As someone says below, it's important to drain the gasoline at the end of the winter, so it doesn't gum up over the summer. Even if there was a battery-powered two-stage snowblower, why would anyone get one? It'd be a waste of lithium.
Trying to make sense of these two sentences. Further down, there's a description of the fairly involved ritual for winterizing a gas snowblower. Why not get a battery-powered one that uses your existing batteries (assuming you went all in to a specific brand) and avoid all that maintenance?
I'm a homeowner who tries to DIY some easy stuff, and decided early to go all in to battery-powered tools. Power tools that need to run for a long time can be annoying (chainsaws, lawnmowers) because I need to plan ahead and have a bunch of batteries charged. But for the most part it has been great. I have appreciated not ever having to maintain a gas supply, deal with gas/oil spills, oil changes, winterizing, etc.
I didn't get the whole Honda addiction until I purchased a used Honda ATV.
My god, it's probably the most well-engineered piece of equipment I've ever owned. Everything about it screams "we learned from everyone's mistakes and made this better!"
With the one glaring exception of an ignition pickup that should never in a million years have broken (requiring taking half the engine off to access it), it's been absolutely perfect.
> It's a game changer. I asked the one neighbor, who'd said previously "the only snowblower I'd buy is a Honda" [1]
My brother in law's family business is small engine sales and maintenance. This is his position as well (and now mine, after having a Honda snowblower for a few years).
Pro tip: always winterize the engine to keep it running for years. Drain the fuel completely, and drain the carburetor bowl. Pull the spark plug and put a cap full of motor oil in the cylinder and gently turn the engine over by hand using the pull cord to coat the walls. Also helps to tape over the exhaust and stuff the intake port with steel wool to keep critters out of the passages. I once had a generator suddenly stop working and upon pulling the plug found a dead spider across the electrodes which shorted it.