Oh, one thing I didn’t explain earlier: the reason I said that you have to be able to move it powered down on your own is that there’s a 100% chance that eventually you’re going to have to. It will be freezing cold and snowing like a bastard when, while you’re at the far end of your driveway, it stalls out and won’t turn over, you run out of gas, or you find a huge rock that wedges itself in the augur. Some winters all three will happen.
I asked some of my new neighbors how they handle the snow and all of them said they hire a local company to take care of it for them. I’m getting some pricing from the company, but at $1,000+ for a good snowblower, I can’t see how it could ever make sense to do this myself. I have nothing to prove…
All good advice - My only add is that if you decide to buy one, research where you buy. Specifically check how warranty service is done and ask what the average turnaround time is for repairs.
My neighbour purchased an snowblower at Home Depot. Great price, on sale etc etc. When he went to try it out at our first January snowfall it wasn’t working.
He returned it to HD and was told they send / receive the units for repair only once a week and he just missed the day. They said he should count on minimum 3 weeks for any repair, a week at their location, a week to get fixed and another week to get it back, anything sooner was a bonus. In the end he missed about 5 weeks of winter and most of the snowfall for that season.
He regretted not buying it at our local shop. They service what they sell on site and warranty is a priority for them. If they have parts, they have it back with 24 to 48 hours. Snowblowers are complex machines with lots of moving parts, they will breakdown frequently.
Lesson learned.
I’m surprised you get that little snow up there! When we lived in Telluride with 300"+ we had a service with a backhoe for the driveway and a Honda 32" 2-stage monster (which has never failed to start in 15 years). Here in Bozeman people are almost universally using Honda gas single-stage units. About 100" a year here in town. https://powerequipment.honda.com/snowblowers/models/hs720am Knock on wood the 13HP Honda has never needed anything more than oil changes, correct jetting, and shear pins.
Still $700 bucks, though. A neighborhood kid might be the best option.
They’re also called sled shovels, and are actually quite effective if you’re going to be removing snow manually. The only downside is you need to have a fair amount of space to dump the snow since they’re not very good at piling it up very high. But they do make it easy to drag loads of snow a fair distance.
Not true at all. They’re particularly good for removing the heavy slushy crap that street plows leave at the end of your driveway because you don’t have to lift anything.
I should add to the snow removal advice that my current solution of choice is a plowing service. A snowblower is much cheaper in the long run (I could have bought a good two-stage blower for about the cost of two seasons of snowplowing) but even a good self-propelled two-stage blower is a lot of miserable work especially in the cold and with the wind blowing snow in your face, and I don’t have room in the garage to store one anyway. It’s nice looking out the window in my bathrobe and seeing my driveway completely cleared of snow in a few minutes. He’ll come by multiple times a day if necessary, or if the street plows fuck up the driveway entrance afterwards, he’ll come by again and remove that mess. My only issue with all this is that the last few winters we haven’t had many really big snowfalls.