I guess it's a seller's market now.

[johnridley]

I tried to sell our snowblower a few months ago, but just got hagglers that wanted me to give it away. Today I posted it for sale again (on the discussion board at work) and it got bought in a few minutes.

Then I went out and shoveled the driveway.

I know for a fact that I cleared it way faster with a shovel than I could have with a blower, and it's probably something like 1/10th the work I do every day to ride my bike to work. Our driveway is about 80 feet long. It took I think about 20 minutes to clear.

Comments

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

That's certainly true, but for me at least, it's not going to happen until sometime after I get pretty tired, or if someone has larger snowblowing/pushing equipment than me. I can move snow faster with a GOOD shovel (not ANY, but GOOD) than my particular blower can move it. This is not true if there's a LOT of snow or if the snow is wet, and I have to lift the snow rather than dozer it (dozer blade, non-sticky snow; push fast and the blade throws the snow up and forward). Of course, the blower has a hell of a time with wet snow; if it's really bad I'll use the shovel anyway because the blower just bogs down and gets clogged with ice.

I will say that before I spend the last year-plus riding my bike to work every day, there was no WAY that I could do the whole driveway at full speed without stopping to let my heart stop threatening me, but it's not a problem anymore. But I'd decided to sell the blower before then anyway.

I think this particular blower is just a bad size; it's not a little "thrower" type single stage that you can horse around; it's too big and heavy and it moves under its own power or not at all, so you have the overhead of putting it into reverse to turn it around, changing gears, etc. And it's too small to be faster than shovelling.

The neighbor has a big John Deere 400 series tractor with a big mounted hydraulically powered blower on the front. Yeah, he can kick my butt clearing driveways.