If you’re looking for an easy snow blower to use, look no further than a leaf blower. These machines are simple to operate and can easily clear snow from sidewalks and driveways. Plus, they’re great for keeping your home clean while the snow falls.
Why Leaf Blow Snow?
For folks reading this article after the winter winds deposited a wet slushy 12 inches on their driveway, leaf-blowing the snow accumulation isn’t a viable solution. At that point, you’re stuck attacking it with a snow blower (preferably a two-stage model to cut through that heavy snow) or getting a good workout with a shovel.
But if you live in the land of ice and snow, you’re familiar with waking up to an inch or three of powder snow covering everything—the winter equivalent of a little summer drizzle
It’s almost pointless to snow blow it because it’s so light the snow blower tends to just throw it directly up in the air, and it’s annoying to shovel it because you spend so much time moving so little snow around. But a leaf blower is a whole different story. You can do your best mother nature impression and create your own high-speed wind to blast light snow away.
The blower directs a concentrated air stream right along the ground and blows the snow right off steps, sidewalks, patios, and even your driveway if you use a sort of side-walking cutting motion to “sweep” the snow across the width of the driveway.
Just this morning, I cleared two inches of snow off my car in about 20 seconds, just sweeping the blower back and forth over the car—and then finished off the rest of my morning snow-clearing routine in a few minutes.
You Really Want an Electric Leaf Blower for Snow
While you can certainly use a gasoline-powered snow blower to blow snow off your car or patio, we’re not going to recommend it. Sure, they’re powerful, and sure they have a long run-time. But they’re super noisy (your neighbors will hate you), and the exhaust has a very distinct smell (so you might go to work smelling like small engine exhaust).
Skip the noise, the smell, and the hassle of starting up a gas blower by using a battery-powered electric model.
And, not only that, they’re unbelievably cheap to operate. Check out our look at electric lawn mower operating costs if you want to be blown away (leaf blower pun not intended) by how economical it is to charge and operate battery-powered yard tools.
Options like this EGO Power+ 765 CFM are more than powerful enough with a good run time. And if you want to be extra stealthy Ryobi’s “Whisper Series” blowers are unbelievably quiet.
With either model, or something similar, the next time you wake up to snow you’d describe as “just deep enough to be annoying,” you can slap a battery on the ol’ leaf blower and blast everything clean.
