How to Pick a Snow Blower

Hey, how are you doing? I'm Tim Carter from askthebuilder.com. Tell me this is going to be a sweet looking machine, do you see what it does? Yeah, it blows snow. That’s what they called Snow Blowers. And I want to talk to you a little bit today about snow blowers and more than anything, the differences between them when you go shopping for one because you know what, you can get confused really quickly, so let me show you something here really quickly.

Look at this one. So, this snow blower here looks a lot like this snow blower here. It’s the same color. It’s the same company that’s selling it. They look almost identical but you know what there are some pretty big differences. Here is the one thing you need to see right away. Look at how wired they are. This particular one, it’s 26 inches. This machine over here, it’s only 24 inches from here to here, not much of a difference but you know what it may take a little bit more effort for you to turn the larger one and they even come bigger than 26 inches.

Now, another thing you want to look at is how do you control the shoot where the snow comes out of? That is really important. And look at this one. Once again, imagine you're at the store, both of these look identical but there are vast differences how you control parts of the machine. On this particular model, I can make the snow go to the left, straight, or to the right by cranking this handle. Alright, so that’s not bad. But if I want to snow to go up straight or down lower, I have to come out here and I have to kind of undo that little handle and then I have to rotate this shoot by hand. Well, you may not want to do it that way so look at this one.

This particular machine, everything’s up here very near to your hand your controls much closer and I can make the shoot to the left or right by simply rotating this like a joystick left or right. And look at this, with just my hand, I can make the shoot go up or down while I'm standing behind the machine. That’s pretty important. From a control aspect, you got to think about that when you go to buy your snow blower. Finally, pay attention to the size of the engine you know the bigger the engine, the more power, the more it’s going to be able to handle heavier snow and of course when you look at the engines, they’ll tell you, they used to tell your horsepower, they’ve kind of gotten away from that. Now, they tell you how big the engine is. The engine on this one is 208 cubic centimeters of displacement and the engine on this on says a 179 cubic centimeter, so no doubt this is a smaller engine not going to produce enough power is the bigger one.

Here is the last thing. How does the snow blower work? So, the way these snow blowers work and notice it’s not on. You never want to put your hands down here when the thing is turning because you’ll get your hands cut off. This is called the dual stage or two stage snow blower. Here is why. This work and they’re curve in such a way that they cut into the snow and they fit it back into the machine here. And back deep in here, I don't want o put my hand there, it’s really dangerous. I don't know if you can see this, now these ogres turn kind of slow. They’re not really, really fast, but back here is this high speed empower that’s a lot like a, oh I don't know it’s just like a paddle yeah it’s just like just a paddle on an old paddle boat. And that bad boy, it really spins fast and think how fast this got to be able to be spin to be able to handle all these snow out here into that small area. And each shoots that snow out there and it could shoot it 20, 30, 40 feet sometimes. But look at this machine, come here. Here is a cute little snow blower, same thing, kind of a snow blower but guess what, it’s a single stage. It only has one way that it actually takes care of the snow. This particular machine, it’s got an ogre like you see but it feeds the snow back and then as the ogre spins, it just spins around and this part of the ogre throws the snow up into here so you can see how this one works. But imagine that spinning around very, very quickly and that’s the only part of the machine that throws the snow. So, that’s a single stage. So, keep that in mind and typically you're going to find that the dual stage machines have a lot more power. It can throw a lot more snow, would do a lot more work.

So, it’s really that simple. That’s how snow blowers work and I highly recommend that you talk to some friends and neighbors that have one maybe even rent one if that is possible just to see how they feel but here is the best part. Most of these bigger ones are a gas powered, they’re all self-propelled, they’ve got different gears and transmissions. It’s easy to operate. You just kind of walk behind, it’s like a self propelled—hardly any effort at all and make sure you get one that’s got electric start where you actually can just push a button if you want to after you’ve plugged it in to an extension cord. They’re going to work really great.

I'm Tim Carter for Ask the Builder. And one last thing, make sure when you get one of these things, read the safety instructions really, really important. I'm Tim Carter, Ask the Builder.

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