How to choose a cordless snow blower

Snow blower marketing leads on clearing width because it is the biggest number on the machine. It is the second most important spec at best. Here is what actually decides the purchase, in order, and what the spec sheets refuse to tell you.

The four specs, in order of importance

1. Intake height, the one that is a hard limit

Intake height is the depth of snow the machine can take in a single pass. Above it, the machine is climbing rather than clearing and you are taking two bites at the same drift.

2. Clearing width, which is really a pass count

Width does not decide capability, it decides how long the job takes. The arithmetic is the same shape as mowing: driveway area divided by effective width gives linear feet, and linear feet divided by run length gives passes.

3. Energy on board

None of these machines publishes a runtime. All three publish driveway coverage, which is a better figure anyway, and all three run two battery packs.

Those three claims converge on roughly 47 to 50 watt-hours per car-space, which is the number to size a purchase against. We work it through in the snow blower runtime guide.

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4. Throw distance and chute control

Throw distance decides where the snow lands relative to where you are working. Too short and you re-clear your own output on the next pass; on a narrow lot, too far in the wrong direction puts it on a path you also have to clear.

Published figures here are tight: up to 50 feet on both two-stage machines and up to 45 feet on the single-stage. All three publish a 200-degree chute rotation, which is the more useful of the two figures — it is what lets you place snow rather than simply move it.

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The specs nobody publishes

• Runtime in minutes. None of the three. Coverage claims are the substitute and are arguably better, but they cannot be compared with any other tool category.
• Weight. Only Greenworks publishes one: 176.4 lb. Neither EGO machine publishes a weight at all, on a product you push through snow and store for eleven months.
• Noise. None of the three publishes a decibel figure — the same silence we found across every walk-behind mower in our registry.
• Cold-weather battery derating. Nobody in this category publishes one for any tool, which matters more here than anywhere else on the site.
• Snow depth for the Greenworks coverage claim. EGO states 8 inches for both of its claims; Greenworks states none.

The decision that outlives the machine

A snow blower is used a handful of times a year and carries two of the largest packs in the range. That makes the platform question sharper here than anywhere else: EGO's Peak Power runs its machines on any two 56V packs you already own, while the Greenworks runs on 80V and nothing else — not even Greenworks' own 40V or 60V lines.

If you own neither platform, this is an expensive place to start one. We work the winter side of that decision through in which battery platform for winter.

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What we cannot tell you

We have not used a snow blower of any kind. We cannot tell you how any of these machines behaves in wet heavy snow versus dry powder, how the augers cope with the compacted ridge a plow leaves at the end of a driveway, or how much of a published coverage claim survives a cold morning.

What we can do is rank the specifications in the order that actually decides the purchase, and name every figure the manufacturers chose not to print.