Best big boy toy in a long time Snow Thrower

After shoveling out from the Christmas storm here in the Boston area, I spent several days checking out Consumer Reports and online reviews before choosing this snow blower (price, sturdiness, and warranty were the deciding factors for me), and was more than a little apprehensive given the mixed reviews and that CR didn't include this in their most recent testing. Now that I've used it a few times, I thought I'd provide my experiences so far.

I was realistic and had braced for the fact that this wouldn't be a power horse, so when the first chance to use it came with 18" of heavy, wet snow, I was accepting of the fact that the snow blower wasn't really helpful in that situation. It did help a little. As others have noted, you can sort of chew away at pieces at a time, but I really can't say that I was able to snow blow "in layers" because the blower itself is heavy. It's not just going to glide along at 10" above the ground (I really don't understand what people mean when they say they did layers). At best, I could push the machine into the snow repeatedly until I made a little headway, or I could sort-of shovel off the top and then try to blow the rest, but doing all this was probably as exhausting as shoveling would have been - my arms and back were really feeling tremendous strain trying to get the blower to make any forward progress, and it was taking *forever*. I ended up only using the snow blower for about half of my 80' driveway and shoveling the rest. I wasn't sure I was going to keep it after that.

The next two storms have more than made up for the investment, and I'm positive I'll be keeping this machine. There was a 5" snow storm which ended in rain, leaving a heavy, soggy, horrible mess. I didn't think the blower would handle it, but it did with ease. I was able to quickly do my entire driveway in about 20 minutes, just leaving some stuff to clean up on the edges and some places the blower couldn't get to. The weight/wetness of the snow didn't seem to cause it any problems... there was no straining or any difficulty. Pushing the machine was easy, and I liked that the blower could clear all the way down to pavement.

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