How to buy a snowblower

all right guys today we're going to be covering snow blower Basics and this video is sponsored by our friends from powersmart and what we're going to be talking about are battery powered snow blowers versus gas powered snowboarders we've got single stages up front dual stages in the back end of it and we're going to be covering all of the basics to help you guys understand which one you may or may not want to have let's get right into it as we flip these two snow blowers up these are our battery powered units we can safely flip them up and move them if these were the gas I'd have gas or oil spilling out that's one of the media benefits to battery versus gas is storage and the ability to not worry about fumes fuss or anything along those lines and a lot of people maybe tend to drawn toward battery because it's just simple easy Plug and Play Go but gas has some benefits that you may want to reconsider and we're going to cover that later but let's get into the basics let's look at the Auger system here this is a two-stage snowblower this right here is considered the primary or first stage dive a little bit deeper into here right here this is your second stage so whenever you see a snow blower saying it's a two stage there's even a few that make a three-stage snowblower what they're referring to is how many different types of augers and how those work together as we look at this one this is your single stage snowblower and this has an eight inch rubber Paddle Wheel here's where it gets a little bit weird is these single stage snow blowers like you see here these light compact ones they're actually more designed for commercial work guys like me use them for sidewalks no removal for getting uptight to garage doors this is something that we can go out grab this snow blower throw it in the back of a pickup truck and get out to a job site we're not going to be doing that with a heavier two-stage snowblower typically what you'll see with these big two-stage snow blowers is those are more utilized for driveways for personal use and the reason I say that is these are self-propelled these will take the weight of the machine forward for you where the two single stages it's all up to you all right now some people may migrate to our battery for the ease of use and simplicity but the gas snow blowers have something that makes life a lot easier here and that's an extension cord well they don't come with an extension cord but if you happen to have one you can use them to fire up your gas snow blower and I'll tell you it takes all of the anguish away from dealing with gas and in fact this single stage is the only one that I've ever seen that actually can fire up using an extension cord so you simply plug it into here and you hit the big red Go Button and you're in business these do come with a key a red key that's your off switch right there now if you don't happen to have an extension cord handy and you just got to get her to go and here's something that I find kind of interesting as well this single stage snowblower runs off the same cc engine as the dual stage over here but let's just watch this one fire up as well we take our extension cord we plug it into our electric start and let's just fire it up manually foreign these up really isn't that much of an issue but as we go over to the battery powered once let's see what it takes to get these to start to go if we come in here real tight here's your on switch here's your off switch first thing we want to make sure is we got a battery in place pop that in here's your kill switch just like on the other ones is inside of it and you hold this down and now you've got green means go light and you've got three seconds to activate any switch because it'll Auto turn off to save the battery so turn it on and now if I want to go forward or actually the AUG this side is the auger it just kicks in right away she's on she's got forward reverse all at our fingertips ready to go right here and then over here we've got almost the same setup but just a little bit different we make sure our battery's in place hold our buttons and then where she's on you can I don't want to snow blow because I'm gonna don't want to hit my camera but she's ready to go that's as simple as it gets you're not dealing with checking battery gas you're not worried about old fuel in it carburetors cleaning anything like that but let's go over some of the individual specs and then let's put these things to work out in our Field of Dreams behind us all right this first unit that we're looking at is a 21 inch single stage gas snow blower it has a 212 cc engine with a 12 and a half inch auger intake it uses an eight inch rubber auger and like the other snow blowers in this video it has a two year warranty okay the second snow blower is a 24 inch two-stage gas snow blower a 212 cc engine with electric start six forward gears two reverse gears and it's made right in a tasket Illinois the price all right this snow blower is the 80 80 volt 24 inch cordless snow blower this one does come with a one and a half amp hour fast charger it has two brushless motors in it and it has steel auger system it gives you around 40 minutes of run time now this one is the 80 volt 21 inch cordless snow blower battery powered with an 80 volt six amp hour battery 45 minutes of run time recharges that battery in 90 minutes all right so right here this is actually your up and down shoot control this Chute actually rotates using uh the rotating handle this is a tried and true system that's been in the industry for a while and it works here's your six forward speeds right here with your two in Reverse this is your safety lever this also activates your auger and over here this is your drive control let's go put her to the test snow we're blowing flush it's like slushy like that's right you touch it with your dirty nose pickers out of my biggest tanks you never ask another guy how his fingers taste that is a No-No ah so let's look at the control panel with this one your shoot control is right here this is your up and down okay and you shoot angle is right here so your shoot steering control levers here your augers here and then you've got uh it's more like a hydrostatic it just goes forward and reverse it gives you just the kind of the speed indicator range so this and then we have a light right here as well so this is your light button uh green means go machine is on I got a tape measure if you want to drop a tape on it no yours technically they're saying this will throw snow 40 feet and this isn't snow this is slush so if it's throwing at 40 feet then light Pottery fluffy snow it's not going to have any issues with whatsoever [Music] foreign [Music] you also have a thumb drive or a finger drive to make it operate that is actually a nice feature Zach made a point go ahead Zach tell them you're that this is Zach's point of course where how this one has it it enclosed inside here so you don't have to worry about snow and stuff getting in there or the two stage here has it exposed on the outside you get packed snow with ice whatnot then you gotta let that melt out or something if you get stopped or whatever you gotta dig that out what or this one you could dump a pile of snow on top of it lift it up nice and dry and she's still good to go um this one's going to be much different trying to do it in off-road conditions like this yeah you you you're to push not you hear the power yep you're the power so let's see how that works out when I'm the power going to be able to see pretty quickly where the single stage non-propelled snow blowers would do much better on flat level surfaces such as driveways or sidewalks and not so hot on uneven terrain or off-road conditions like we're showing here so if you didn't notice it before your shoot control is right here pretty straightforward simple operation everything is just manually done your auger activation is right here then it has your Chute clean out right on the handle don't be sticking your nose pickers in there trying to clean it out especially while it's running unless you don't like them so that is the gas single stage out of breath old man it's been it's been a long winter I'll tell you we've had as much snow in four weeks as we typically get in a whole season but that is the gas single stage with the eight inch rubber auger one thing to point out I guess one of the things I would like to say about this system right here is gas I got to be careful this is designed not to hurt soft surfaces so like my deck up there if you are plowing for somebody else you're worried about scratching anything up that's the benefit of having this kind of a replaceable rubber auger it is a wear part just like any uh like brakes on your car but you can usually go even in commercial applications we'll go two three four seasons before we start to really worry about replacing that rubber auger it's just a matter of how much you're actually going to be using it and now we're going to go to the battery powered single stage and see how she arrives okay so with the get with the battery powered single stage you got to hold this down and you got to hit the button same time Zach's having too much fun I think I think he's having way way too much fun look at him he's smiling like a monkey eating crap on a frosted morning all right so that's the battery-powered single stage and although you're the power the author itself doesn't seem to have any problem going through some pretty nasty stuff and some pretty nasty ice all right we have not cleaned up in this area once yet this year so this uh this is a virgin ground basically in here uh we're just gonna clean up around these cars so that we got an extra spot to put even more cars [Music] what do you think you can go through that or this yeah probably it was shooting I I hit a log uh stick under there and I shot it out well let's see what it'll do let's see what it'll do let's get some of these bigger sons of a duck out of here fun one yeah yeah I like equipment all right go for it so if you hit an obstacle like a big piece of wood a stick or maybe you do something like rapid dog chain or a rope up into the auger there's what's called a shear bolt under there and that isn't part that is designed to break and it's nothing more than a simple bolt or pin that is replaceable so if for some reason your auger system stops working check the shear bolt in there to make sure that that hasn't snapped on you but we're gonna see if we can get one of these to snap on us just to show you all right guys well we're gonna keep going we got a bunch of parking spots we gotta get cleared out of here days and some of the worst conditions I think you can think of there's nothing worse than blowing chunks of ice and snow this stuff it just doesn't blow it's not like fluffy it's the worst you can think of that's a big stick and that's gonna do it for this one I hope you guys enjoyed the ride God bless go get him today see on the next one we're just gonna be here working