The secret lives of snowblowers
lcamtuf.substack.com
lcamtuf.substack.com
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.
For a second i heard lewis black in my head say "Steve shot his nuts off" but he doesn't, he actually says "thurston shot his nuts off"
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
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 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.....
I agree with you, mostly, but life is nuanced.
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.
I'm in SW Wisconsin these days.
We were gifted a battery snowblower. It basically doesn’t work. Maybe there are better ones that do, but this thing was not fit for purpose at all.
Give battery tech a few more years on its growth curve and it’ll handle your 300ft driveway no problem.
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.
I don't doubt the future will make them comparable and lower in cost but I wouldn't buy one today.
The larger ones don't yet have an electric option available.
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.
For leaf blowers and weed trimmers I agree.
[1]: Similar to https://youtu.be/Rni8F0GFjW4?t=145 but just imagine the mountains/rolls of hay to be 2m high and the slope be >45°s
I'm sure it was hard work, but a farm in the Swiss mountains for a period of time sounds like a life experience!
(the dairy farmer near us has Simmentaler and Rotfleck)
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
> 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.
Up in Door County the lake would freeze enough to ski on, but nowadays, well good luck with that.
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.
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.
Every situation is different.
The average number of days with snow on the ground has been decreasing by about 5 days per decade since I was a kid:
https://glisa.umich.edu/resources-tools/climate-impacts/prec...
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.
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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=mustie1+snowblo...
Even with the engine stopped, there can be enough energy stored in the drivetrain to make a mess of your fingers when it's suddenly released.
This reminder is brought to you by the guy I knew who had two deformed fingers from two different snow blower jam-clearing incidents.
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].
[1] https://powerequipment.honda.com/snowblowers / https://www.reddit.com/r/HondaSnowblowers/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tecumseh_Products#Gasoline_eng... / https://www.snowblowerforum.com/threads/made-in-the-usa-vers...
[3] https://www.snowblowerforum.com/posts/1733694/ / https://www.snowblowerforum.com/posts/1733738/
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).
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.
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.